What We're Reading, Watching and Listening To

Roaming Freely in a Land of Restraints

2008-08-14T21:19:00.001-04:00

The New York Times
August 13, 2008

By ABBY AGUIRRE

RAMALLAH, West Bank — There is an Arabic word for Raja Shehadeh’s pastime. “Sarha is to roam freely, at will, without restraint,” he writes in “Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape,” an account of six walks in the West Bank, which won this year’s Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent award for political writing, and was published by Scribner in the United States in June. “A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place.”

Of course, it is difficult not to be restricted by time and place in the occupied territories, where movement is everyday more limited by a growing number of Israeli-built fences, walls, barriers, checkpoints, settlements and the separate roads constructed to link them. But Mr. Shehadeh — a lawyer and founder of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization, who apart from a sojourn in London for law school has lived his entire life in Ramallah — still tries.

One recent walk began on the side of a road near the village of Ein Sinya, a short drive from the city center. Mr. Shehadeh took measured steps down a trail lined with sage, Syrian thistle, flowering oregano and wild artichoke. On either side rose limestone-buttressed terraces of olive trees.
“We have an exquisite quality of light here,” he said, motioning to the surrounding buttes.

The bucolic landscape is scarcely the West Bank of popular imagination. It was with that prevailing impression in mind that Mr. Shehadeh set out to write the book — to put on paper his experience of the place, mediated neither by historical imagination nor by images in the news, for readers who think of it only in terms of conflict and violence.

In the book, though, one walk is interrupted when Mr. Shehadeh’s 10-year-old nephew picks up an unexploded missile; another when he and his wife come under prolonged gunfire from the Palestinian police. The six walks, from 1978 to 2006, become more fraught over time.

Not far into the valley the trail came to and then ran alongside a tall limestone bluff that resembled a cresting wave. Midway down was a constellation of Arabic words spray-painted on the rock. Mr. Shehadeh stopped and read them aloud: “Ahmad, Aqel, Jojoo, Anas, Nidal, Kamal — Raja!”

Pleased at the sight of Palestinian names grafted on the land, Mr. Shehadeh continued down the trail. After a switchback and past a small cave, he came upon an igloo-shaped stone structure called a qasr — a type of dwelling where farmers once lived, storing their olives inside and sleeping on the roof.

“This one is quite well preserved,” he said, “like that of Abu Ameen.” Mr. Ameen, a cousin of Mr. Shehadeh’s grandfather, was a stonemason who lived in a qasr, the author’s discovery of which makes up the book’s first chapter.

Mr. Shehadeh’s grandfather, Saleem, was a judge in the courts of British Mandate Palestine. His father, Aziz, was a lawyer too. (One of the first Palestinians to advocate a two-state solution publicly, Aziz Shehadeh was stabbed to death in the family’s driveway in 1985. The case was never solved.) Mr. Ameen represents the side of the Shehadeh family that did not join the professional class, and a life of ultimate sarha.

Beyond a long rock ledge was another hill of terraces. Mr. Shehadeh preferred not to tread on the fields, as they were freshly plowed, or scale up the retaining walls, for fear of eroding them. He turned around.
“Natsh,” he said, pointing at a wiry, thorny thistle alongside the trail.
Thought by some to have been the material used for Jesus’ crown of thorns in the Bible, natsh has in recent years been put to a contemporary use. Mr. Shehadeh’s work as a lawyer has primarily involved defending Palestinians in Israel’s military land courts, where, he recounts in the book, natsh is often cited as evidence that a particular plot of land is untilled and thus unoccupied.

As Mr. Shehadeh navigated through the natsh, a herd of goats and a shepherd came wandering over the hilltop and started down the incline, rounding switchbacks single file and then flooding into the fields.
“Peace be with you,” Mr. Shehadeh said in Arabic.
“And on you be peace,” the man responded.

Halfway up the slope, his face pink from the climb, Mr. Shehadeh stopped to survey the westward view: gently overlapping ridges, more terraces, more olive groves and, dotting the hillsides, clusters of flat-roofed stone buildings: Palestinian villages.

“Jefna, Birzeit, Atara,” he said, naming each village, as well as a Palestinian refugee camp — “Jalazon” — in their midst. “See how the light shines on the limestone?”

Spilling around the southernmost ridge in Mr. Shehadeh’s line of view were also orderly rows of red-slanted rooftops, unmistakably those of an Israeli settlement. Asked the name, Mr. Shehadeh’s voice fell.

“Beit El,” he said, adding, after a pause, “On walks, I try not to see those.”
Finding walks in Ramallah on which an Israeli settlement cannot be seen is nearly impossible. There are roughly 130 settlements and outposts in the West Bank and about a dozen in the Ramallah area. They remain one of the most contentious matters of the conflict, and for Palestinians who hike, a source of considerable vexation. Mr. Shehadeh, a Christian, says he cannot count the number of times his hikes have been halted by settlers, some armed, who will not accept as an explanation for his presence in the hills that he is simply on a walk.

But Beit El was far enough in the distance that one could make out neither its bunkers nor its coils of razor wire. Mr. Shehadeh’s attention drifted and became fixed on something in the dirt. He brightened and leaned over to pick it up. It was a shard of brown pottery.

“Probably from Roman times,” he said, placing it back on the ground.
Atop the hill and along its northeastern face stood mounds and walls of limestone blocks, once the towers and vaulted chambers of a 12th-century Crusader castle. Mr. Shehadeh laid down a blanket and ate a breakfast of flatbread, goat cheese, tomatoes and olives. Dessert was cactus fruit cut from hardy, paddle-shaped leaves growing out of rubble nearby.
“Bite slowly,” he instructed. “There are many seeds.”

The site overlooked to the north the old road to Nablus, now impassable. To get to Nablus one must follow a circuitous route that circumnavigates hills to the east, adding hours to what was once a 30-minute drive — if one is Palestinian. Israelis may use newer, more direct roads. Mr. Shehadeh in the book saves his harshest judgments for this spreading web of segregated highways, built after anti-Israel attacks.

“Whether we call it Israel or Palestine, this land will become one big concrete maze,” he writes.

His eye wandered to a hunk of limestone in the dirt. It was a fossil, with lines fanning out from its center. He inspected the grooves.
“From when this was a sea floor,” he said.

The finding was appropriate, Mr. Shehadeh having explained earlier that one of the few comforts available to those living through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a long view, but a geologic one.
“Eventually nature overpowers all of us,” he said. “The crusaders were here for hundreds of years, and what is left of them is stones. Plants grow, and nature takes over. We are small dots in the continuum of time.”
It was now close to 11 a.m., and the sun was punishing. Mr. Shehadeh prefers in the summer to be off the hills before the heat becomes too wilting, so he made a hard right down the descent.

He encountered the road just south of where it forked in two directions. Splintering to the left was the old way to Nablus, now a dirt path obstructed by concrete blocks. Traffic heading north was thus diverted to the right, through a string of villages, two checkpoints and, finally, to a barrier, where Palestinians may park, cross another checkpoint on foot and, if needed, continue on by bus.

But Mr. Shehadeh was not headed north. He waited a while in the shade for a southbound bus, and was soon flying along the winding road back to Ramallah. His window rolled down, he said nothing. He appeared not to be thinking about the blocked road or of the settlements, more of which were now popping into view.

Nor did he seem to be thinking of the three English words that had appeared next to the Arabic names near the trailhead, the only writing on the rock he had not read aloud. “Time is pain,” it said.

What Are the Wounds of War?

2008-05-15T16:17:00.001-04:00

Military Debates Purple Heart Awards For Mental Stress

By YOCHI J. DREAZENMay 13, 2008; Page A11
WASHINGTON -- Centuries before Iraq and Afghanistan, George Washington created the Purple Heart to honor troops wounded in combat.
Matthew Leake
But with an increasing number of troops being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the modern military is debating an idea Gen. Washington never considered -- awarding one of the nation's top military citations to veterans with psychological wounds, not just physical ones.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered cautious support for such a change on a trip to a military base in Texas this month.
"It's an interesting idea," Mr. Gates said in response to a question. "I think it is clearly something that needs to be looked at."
The Pentagon says it isn't formally considering a change in policy at this point, but Mr. Gates's comments sparked a heated debate on military blogs, message boards and email lists. The dispute reflects a broader question roiling the military: Can psychological traumas, no matter how debilitating, be considered equivalent to dismembering physical wounds?
Supporters of awarding the Purple Heart to veterans with PTSD believe the move would reduce the stigma that surrounds the disorder and spur more soldiers and Marines to seek help without fear of limiting their careers.
The High Price Paid
"These guys have paid at least as high a price, some of them, as anybody with a traumatic brain injury, as anybody with a shrapnel wound," John Fortunato, who runs a military PTSD treatment facility in Texas, told reporters recently. Absent a policy change, Dr. Fortunato told reporters, troops will mistakenly believe that PTSD is a "wound that isn't worthy."
Opponents argue that the Purple Heart should be reserved for physical injuries, as has been the case since the medal was reinstituted by Congress in 1932. Military regulations say the award should go to troops with injuries "received in action with an enemy." Some opponents also note that PTSD can be faked, which can't easily be done with a physical wound.
"The Purple Heart was meant to be a badge of honor to show you were wounded in battle," says Bob Mackey, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in the first and second Iraq wars. "I've been in combat three times. There's stuff I've had to deal with. But it's substantially different from being physically hurt."
The biggest difference, he says, is that some veterans may be diagnosed with PTSD even if they never saw combat or fought an enemy -- requirements, historically, for receiving a Purple Heart.
Lasting Torment
Military historians believe that the syndrome now known as PTSD -- usually characterized by nightmares, sleeplessness and anxiety -- has been around for as long as humans have gone to war.
The American Psychological Association formally recognized PTSD in 1980, and the term quickly entered the popular imagination as a way of describing the suffering of veterans emotionally traumatized by what they had seen or done in Vietnam.
Today, PTSD is emerging as one of the signature maladies of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which lack clear front lines and pit U.S. forces against enemies who operate out of densely packed civilian areas.
A recent California-based research institution Rand Corp. study concluded that 300,000 of the military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan have symptoms of the disorder, which can sometimes lead to suicide. The report found tragedies closely linked to the development of PTSD: Half of the 1.6 million troops who spent time in the two war zones had friends who were seriously wounded or killed, while about 45% saw dead or wounded civilians.
The young soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq and Afghanistan came of age in a culture obsessed with therapy and mental disease, but the Rand study suggests that today's troops are no more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who fought in Vietnam. A 2006 study in the journal Science estimated that 18.7% of Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, a figure virtually identical to Rand's estimate for veterans of the current wars.
Military officers and psychologists fear that veterans of the two wars will suffer mental-health problems for decades to come, a largely hidden cost of the current conflicts.
"There's a financial cost to this, but more importantly there'll be a cost in lives if we don't get a handle on this problem now," Sen. Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) said in a recent interview. He is crafting a new bill designed to improve veterans' mental-health care.
Sen. Bond's bill would allow active-duty soldiers suffering from mental-health problems to use the much-larger network of Veterans Administration facilities and treatment centers. It would also train veterans to offer psychological assistance to other returning service personnel.
The Stigma
Many military personnel are reluctant to seek counseling for PTSD because they are afraid that seeking help would harm their careers. A recent survey by the American Psychiatric Association found that 75% of military personnel felt that asking for assistance would reduce their chances for promotion.
"There's a real fear that admitting to mental illness will mean being stigmatized," said Carolyn Robinowitz, the organization's president.
The Pentagon's Mr. Gates has worked hard to dispel that stigma, recently pushing through a rule change allowing military personnel to get counseling for PTSD without having it negatively affect their security clearances.
The question of whether veterans suffering from PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart is a deeply emotional issue for military personnel and their families.
Carol Schultz Vento's father, Arthur, was a World War II veteran who took part in the D-Day invasion and won a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts during his service in Europe.
"From my perspective, the PTSD impaired his functioning more than the physical injuries," she says.
Ms. Vento is working on a book about the emotional traumas World War II veterans like her father suffered, and believes PTSD victims should be eligible for the Purple Heart.
"But for their war experiences, those veterans would not have been traumatized and struggle to adapt to postwar life -- and some don't make it," she says.
Robert Certain is a retired Air Force colonel who was shot down over Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1972 and held as a prisoner of war. He received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts and later became an Air Force chaplain and Episcopal priest.
'Obvious to the Warrior'
Mr. Certain suffered severe depression in the 1980s and was formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2000.
Mr. Certain says that he is conflicted about whether veterans with PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart. In his own case, the disorder wasn't diagnosed until decades after the Vietnam War ended but he believes that making troops suffering from the disorder eligible for the award might persuade more of them to seek help.
In an email, he wrote: "The scars resulting from PTSD are almost all invisible to the observer, but always obvious to the warrior who has them."

MOURNERS' KADDISH IN TIME OF WAR AND VIOLENCE

2008-05-05T12:31:00.000-04:00

[The Jewish prayer that is used to mourn the dead is the Kaddish, though it has in it only one word -- "nechamata, consolations" - which hints at mourning. In this version, changes in the last line of the Hebrew and English texts specifically include praying for shalom, peace, not only for the people Israel (as in the traditional version) but also for the children of Abraham and Hagar through Ishmael (Arabs and Muslims) and for all who dwell on this planet. [The interpretive English addresses the meaning of "shmei rabbah," the "Great Name," which is interpreted as that name which includes all the names of all beings in the universe and which is also present within all beings. [The interpretive English suggests why in the midst of saying we cannot praise or sing to God enough to fully celebrate the Awesome Reality, we also say we cannot CONSOLE (nechamata) God enough. In our view, while many forms of death are part of the great spiral of all life, one kind of death -- the killing of one human, bearing the Image of God, by another -- leaves God inconsolable. [in the next-to-last verse this version focuses on preserving life for those of our own "family," the Godwrestlers, and then in the last verse it prays for shalom for us [those immediately present], for all the Godwrestling folk (Israel), for all the children of Ishmael, and for all peoples. [This Kaddish was developed by The Shalom Center and Rabbi Arthur Waskow.] Yitgadal V'yit'kadash Shmei Rabah May the Great Name, through our expanding awareness and our fuller action, lift Itself to become still higher and more holy; May our names, along with all the names of all the beings in the universe, live within the Great Name; May the names of all whom we can no longer touch but who have touched our hearts and lives, remain alight within our memories and in the Great Name; May the names of all who have died in violence and war be kept alight in our sight and in the Great Name, with sorrow that we were not yet able to shape a world in which they would have lived. May the Great Name, bearing ALL these names, live within each one of us; (Cong: Amein) B'alma di vra chi'rooteh v'yamlich malchuteh b'chayeichun, u'v'yomeichun, u'v'chayei d'chol beit yisrael, b'agalah u'vzman kariv, v'imru: Amein: -- May Your Great Name lift Itself still higher and more holy throughout the world that You have offered us, a world of majestic peaceful order that gives life to the Godwrestling folk through time and through eternity ---- And let's say, Amein (Cong: Amein) Y'hei sh'mei rabbah me'vorach l'olam almei almaya. So therefore may the Great Name be blessed, through every Mystery and Mastery of every universe. Yitbarach, v'yishtabach, v'yitpa'ar, v'yitromam, v'yitnasei, v'yithadar, v'yit'aleh, v'yithalal -- Shmei di'kudshah, -- Brich hu, (Cong: Brich Hu) May the Great Name be blessed and celebrated, Its beauty honored and raised high; may It be lifted and carried, may Its radiance be praised in all Its Holiness --- Blessed be! L'eylah min kol bir'chatah v'shir'atah tush'be'chatah v'nechematah, de'amiran be'alma, v'imru: Amein (Cong: Amein) Even though we cannot give You enough blessing, enough song, enough praise, enough consolation to match what we wish to lay before You - And though we know that today there is no way to console You when among us some who bear Your Image in our being are slaughtering others who bear Your Image in our being. Yehei Shlama Rabah min Shemaya v'chayyim aleinu v'al kol Yisrael, v'imru Amein. Still we beseech that from the unity of Your Great Name flow great harmony and joyful life for the Godwrestling folk; (Cong: Amein) Oseh Shalom bi'm'romav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael v'al kol yishmael v'al kol yoshvei tevel -- v'imru: Amein. You who make harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe, teach us to make harmony within ourselves, among ourselves -- and peace for the Godwrestling folk, the people Israel; for our cousins the children of Ishmael; and for all who dwell upon this planet.(Cong: Amein) Oseh Shalom bi'm'romav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael v'al kol yishmael v'al kol yoshvei tevel -- v'imru: Amein. =====================================================

Passover Becomes a Rallying Cry for Progressives

2008-04-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

By Anthony WeissThu. Apr 17, 2008

Activists are hoping that as Jews sit down at their Seder tables this year, they will turn their thoughts not just to ancient Egypt but to Sudan, Tibet and even the polar ice caps.
Jewish groups have sponsored a spate of new Haggadahs, additional readings, and supplemental rituals and symbols in an attempt to put social justice on the Passover table.
Though many Jews associate Passover with home and family, it has in recent times become the most political holiday in the Jewish calendar. Each year, Jewish activists and organizations publish new Haggadahs and offer new rituals to introduce contemporary political issues into the celebration of Passover. Interracial and interfaith Seders have become staples of Jewish outreach. Now, Jewish activists are seeing a new upsurge in attempts to connect Passover’s themes to hot-button social issues.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who helped usher in the contemporary era of Jewish activism with his “Freedom Seder,” says that the activist message of Passover has resonated with today’s political climate.
Passover “is about change,” he told the Forward. “It’s about social change, it’s about overthrowing a pharaoh. It’s about the earth itself rising up. All the reasons I did the Freedom Seder [almost] 40 years ago are exactly on point.”
Waskow wrote and organized his Freedom Seder in 1969, drawing on both traditional liturgy and texts by non-Jews such as Mahatma Gandhi to speak about the injustice of racial inequality. That spawned a host of followers; over the next few decades, the Freedom Seder was joined by feminist Seders, gay rights Seders, labor Seders, Soviet Jewry Seders and environmental Seders.
“Modern liberation Haggadahs have some long legs, historically,” said Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Jewish texts at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. “Jews did have a tendency to read themselves into text, and their political situation, throughout history.”
Many of the modern alterations have broken with Jewish tradition in focusing not on particularly Jewish issues but on more universal concerns. One such example this year is the project called An Unlit Candle, which urges Jews to place an unlit candle on their Seder table in protest of the recent Chinese government crackdown in Tibet. Jay Michaelson, one of the organizers (and a regular contributor to the Forward), said that he was encouraged by both the symbolism of candles and light in Jewish ceremony and by seeing the Olympic torch extinguished during the recent protests in Paris.
“In Jewish tradition, candles are symbols of light and freedom,” he said. “The idea is that the Tibetans’ light has not been lit. We’re celebrating what they don’t have.”
The Chinese government has become an ever-more frequent target for Jewish activism in recent weeks. American Jewish World Service, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Religious Action Center — the political arm of the Union for Reform Judaism — have all called on the United States to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics as a rebuke for Beijing’s human rights abuses. At the same time, Orthodox rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Haskell Lookstein have circulated a petition among fellow Jewish leaders, urging Jewish tourists to boycott the Beijing Olympics.
For Passover, the JCPA and AJWS have also teamed up with two non-Jewish organizations, the Save Darfur Coalition and Tents of Hope, to create a Darfur-themed Seder. The Darfur Seder includes a pause for participants to phone their elected officials, as well as a petition that can be sent to China’s special envoy to Darfur. The Seder concludes with the words “Next year without genocide.”
The Seder themes of oppression and redemption have also become rhetorical symbols in non-Jewish settings. On April 17, UNITE HERE, a union of textile workers and hospitality workers, organized a rally outside the offices of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan to advocate higher wages for the company’s cafeteria workers. Though few of the cafeteria workers are Jewish, the rally will feature a mock Seder along with Passover songs.
Oppression is a common political theme, but some organizations have chosen to focus on Passover’s roots as a springtime holiday and to turn the focus to the earth itself. Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center, a social activism organization that has issued a Seder supplement focusing on environmental issues, particularly global warming.
“Maybe in our generation for the first time, when we look at the plagues, we can look at them and say, Oh, I recognize that — those are ecological disasters. That’s a climate disaster,” he told the Forward. “Suddenly, through eyes of where we live now, that exodus is also about the earth.”

Once We Were Strangers Editorial

2008-04-22T12:28:00.001-04:00

Thu. Apr 10, 2008
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Every year at the first full moon of spring, on the 14th day of the biblical month of Nisan, Jews all around the world gather with their families to re-enact their ancestors’ flight from Egyptian slavery. Passover is the most familiar ritual on the Jewish calendar, bringing together Jews of every stripe, the devout and the distant, to share a meal and tell our people’s story. More than any other day, Passover touches us and draws us close because it bears a message that is so instantly recognizable, at once universal and uniquely Jewish: liberation from bondage and oppression.
It is universal because it gives voice to a yearning shared by people everywhere — to be free, to walk in dignity, to enjoy the fruits of our own labor. The legacy of Israel’s exodus from Egypt has been taken up worldwide by those who struggle against their taskmasters, whether European peasants or African slaves. And yet, it is uniquely Jewish because it is indeed our own legacy, the tale of our origin. We remember our humble roots with pride, knowing that our particular story has become the human story.
We remember, and yet we forget. Once, the memory of our oppression made us reach out to others. Now it makes us draw into ourselves. Ritual tells us to remember the stranger as we were strangers in Egypt, to invite all who are hungry to come eat.
But now we shrink from the stranger. We close our doors in fear. In this incomprehensible, upside-down world in which we live today, it seems that the oppressed, the hungry peoples of the Third World, the children of the new ghettoes, have somehow come to see us — us, the children of slaves! — as the oppressor. We see them coming to us with one hand extended in supplication and the other curled into a fist, and in the end we see only the fist.
Of late, we have taught ourselves to reinterpret the Passover holiday so as to reflect our new understanding of oppression. We are no longer hungry or enslaved, most of us, but we are lost in the desert of our freedom. How do we liberate ourselves from this? Teachers come and go and tell us to find the oppressor within ourselves. They urge us to liberate ourselves from our ego, or to flee the narrow spaces within our hearts, or to free ourselves from our new-found freedom and return to tradition. And so Passover becomes Yom Kippur, a time of inner search, or Shavuot, a celebration of the Law, or Tisha B’Av, a remembrance of every past injury.
All these messages have meaning. They add layers of richness to our Seder table. But they are the dessert, not the meal. Passover is a time, first of all, to speak of real liberation from all-too-real bondage. This Passover is a time to speak of Zimbabwe and Tibet — and perhaps even Gaza. It is a time to remember that we were strangers in Egypt, and to call on all who are hungry to come and eat.

THE MUCH TOO PROMISED LAND

2008-04-22T12:22:00.001-04:00

April 16, 2008
Books of The Times
Advice After Two Decades of Arab-Israeli Diplomacy

By ETHAN BRONNER

America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace
By Aaron David Miller
407 pages. Bantam. $26.
In 1990, after the administration of George H. W. Bush had begun talking with the long-shunned Palestine Liberation Organization in the hope of brokering Middle East peace, one of its groups launched an unsuccessful terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv beach. The P.L.O. leader Yasir Arafat refused to expel those involved or distance himself from the operation. The secretary of state, James A. Baker III, new to Mideast diplomacy and already frustrated by its endless ups and downs, said to an aide, Aaron David Miller, that “if I had another life, I’d want to be a Middle East specialist just like you, because it would mean guaranteed permanent employment.”
In the next 18 years Mr. Baker became something of a Mideast specialist himself, and like Mr. Miller, has not wanted for gainful employment. And in this final year of the George W. Bush administration, Mideast specialists are lining up once again to try to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with proposals that look awfully similar to previous ones that failed.
As Mr. Miller, who spent most of the past two decades as a central participant in those efforts, notes in this revealing and well-written memoir, “Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is continuing to try the same approach to solve a problem but expecting different results.”
Mr. Miller, who left government in 2003 and is now a researcher, has a few ideas about how to move forward, but mostly he has sobering tales from the front. He does not spare himself. He recounts, for example, that in 1998, despite many setbacks, he publicly stated that the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993 had reached a point of no return.
“It was as bold (and naïve) an argument as I had ever made,” he writes. He says that even as he felt doubt creeping in, he suppressed it, because the excitement of being part of history outweighed rational analysis.
While Mr. Miller does not prescribe a revolutionary remaking of the peace process, he does devote much of this volume to puncturing what he considers American illusions in the hope that the next round of diplomacy will be more successful. Like his colleagues (including his friend and onetime boss Dennis Ross, who wrote his own account four years ago, “A Missing Peace”), Mr. Miller came to realize that Arafat was highly problematic. But unlike Mr. Ross or Bill Clinton (whose memoir addressed the topic), he argues that the United States has given Israel too much leeway and failed to push it to live up to commitments and make painful choices.
He says Mr. Clinton was far too impressed with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, even suggesting that Mr. Clinton viewed that Israeli soldier-statesman with a filial reverence. He adds, “So we never had a tough or honest conversation with the Israelis on settlement activity.” He also writes, “Long after Rabin’s death, the pattern set by Clinton in the early years would continue. ...”
Mr. Miller, who earned a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the University of Michigan and in the 1980s wrote two books on Palestinians and the P.L.O. while having almost no contact with actual Palestinians, pitches this book as a kind of nonfiction bildungsroman, taking him from political innocence to a tough maturity. The son of a prominent Jewish family in Cleveland with close Republican ties, Mr. Miller offers a picture of himself as someone who slowly and painfully learns that the Middle East conflict is far more complicated than a contest between good guys and bad.
“When you get to know people by actually sitting down and listening to them,” he writes of the Palestinians, “your views begin to change.” He quotes the Palestinian negotiator and intellectual Hanan Ashrawi as saying that Israelis were given all the carrots, and the Palestinians the sticks, and adds, “She was basically right.”
Apart from such self-criticism, what is unusual about this memoir when compared with other, similar ones is how lively, even irreverent, it is. Mr. Miller is a fine raconteur who fills his pages with real characters and sly observations. When he first met Arafat, he says, he was struck by how much he looked like Ringo Starr in Arab headdress. When the Oslo process was in full bloom, and negotiating sessions were dragging on, Mr. Miller observed at one point in a Jerusalem hotel the Palestinian security chief, Jibril Rajub, and the Israeli Army’s central commander, Shaul Mofaz, jokingly pretend to take a nap in the same bed, a remarkable tableau to contemplate.
In the end Mr. Miller seems to admire most the approach of Mr. Baker, a man who is anathema to most American Jews because of his toughness and lack of sentimentality. But this is precisely Mr. Miller’s point: Israel, he says, needs tough love, and American officials must resist American Jewish pressure to give in always to Israeli demands. Here is his advice for the next president contemplating Arab-Israeli diplomacy: “If you’re not prepared to reassure the locals while cracking heads as needed (and both will be needed), don’t bother.”

Keenan Lecture at Spalding University by Louisville peacemaker Joe Grant on April 3

2008-04-07T12:31:00.001-04:00

© 2008 Joe Grant

Seeing in the Dark
Spiritual Resources for Peace and Justice in Troubled Times

And after the great wind, the terrible earthquake and the spectacular fire, there came a sound like sheer silence.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance to the cave. Then there came a voice that said,
“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, they came to the tomb and found it wide open. When they went in they found no-body. Deeply troubled they were suddenly they were dazzled by the brilliance of the messengers, so they buried their faces in fear. And the voice spoke to them saying: “Why do look for the living among the dead?”

Darken the room…
I would like to ask us to take just a few moments to sit together in the dark.
If you have not done so already, please turn off your cell phone.
If you are not in the habit of doing this, I invite you to tuck your cynicism away for the time being (preferably somewhere you won’t be able to find it).
If life has not already done this for you yet, I beg you to lay your certainties down and just for “the now” put to rest any well-crafted answers or sureties you are currently working on. (I’ll give you a few moments for that one.)

Now I implore you to enter the darkness with me … the darkness of not-knowing… the place where real wondering begins… If you want, just for the moment you can close your eyes.
Most of the grace in life comes from learning to receive… so put yourself in a receptive mode…

I realize I am taking a huge risk right now, inviting a bunch of hardworking, committed and conscientious folks to sit quietly in the dark, in comfortable chairs…if you’re like me a trip to movies anymore is an invitation for 90-minute nap. Nonetheless I ask you to close your eyes now that you might see more clearly.

Quiet Still Dark Presence Together

Now, become aware of your breathing… the in and out, the give and take transaction of life… Be attentive to the movement within you- blood rushing back and forth, images that flicker and die.
Become sensitive to the movement of the earth beneath your feet- spinning at 700 miles per hour while we travel at 20 miles per second through darkness we call space.
Let yourself become conscious of all the living that shares life with you – all the breathing and pulsing, chirping and buzzing, scratching and swimming, blossoming and bleeding life that saturates this blue pearl we call mother.

Finally extend a radar sweep, as wide you dare to go, around God’s neighborhood, and make room for the traveling companions with whom we share this singular moment of presence: factory and farm workers, prisoners and police, nurses and nightwalkers, aged and new born, sick and strong; alone and embracing; suffering and celebrating; the killers and the healers; the engaged and the indifferent … the great living sacrament, blessed and broken…

There are a few sore spots I want to draw your heart’s attention to:
Kosovo, Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tibet, Burma, Sudan…

We pray because there is a vast disproportion between human misery and human compassion. (Heschel)

So, now, just for a moment… I ask you to hold it all… to keep it together, to bear witness. Keep vigil, the night watch, over all these God’s own children… spinning in the dark. And let prayer rise from the dark center, the depth within you …

God IS…
God IS with us…
God IS with US… in the dark!
It is good to be here… with YOU in the dark.

Do you see? You can open your eyes…
Do you see now? You’ve got to BE in the dark to see in the dark.

Light the candle.
By now you’re probably wondering whether you’re in the wrong room, or when the lecture is supposed to start. Certainly this is the strangest kind of lecture I’ve attended and I’m the one giving it!

I have a confession to make… I’m not at all sure about lectures and lecturing. A few weeks ago while I was at table, fully engaged in a “teachable moment” with my teenage children, and just reaching the crescendo of an impassioned dissertation on the importance of making alternative choices, my daughter deflated me with a few curtly delivered words accompanied by some sardonic eye-rolling: “Dad let me know when you’re done with the lecture, will you. I got a lot of homework to do…” Now I certainly learned something from that lecture!

The older I become the less sure I am about anything. In the true sense of lecture -reading that which has been gathered (as in gathering firewood) – tonight I hope to share with you some gleanings, picked up from being in the dark with people who are familiar with darkness. I fully expect that I am sharing insights that you will recognize, wisdom that life has given up to you. With I hope we can we can kindle a fire to gather around, and enough light to really recognize one another I main the gloom of these troubled times.

GLEANINGS:
Spirituality is eminently practical - a way of being present.
Some practical orientations for times of trouble
A word of warning:
In large part the tasks of spiritual re-sourcing (returning to the source) involves making space, letting go, putting down and stepping aside.

1. Turn Off The Lights and Listen!

Rabbi Abraham Heschel warns us that: The future of all people depends on their realizing that the sense of holiness is as vital as health.

I wonder: since most of the universe is dark, can darkness be holy?
Darkness has a way of putting things in perspective. All enlightenment happens in the dark- otherwise there’d be no need for it! Turning off the lights –especially our own lights, our inflated sense of ourselves (as Peter Pan would say, “the cleverness of us”)- is a necessary spiritual practice for troubled times. When we dampen down our need to be right, and blinking step from the limelight into the shadows, and while our pupils widen in their hunger light, we are given a new vantage point, a broader and deeper perspective.

One of the consequences of the electric illumination of the nighttime has been the loss of our window into the cosmos. We are literally blinded by our own light! Most people on earth now need to travel to remote locations in search of darkness and its enlightening perspective. As we gaze into the vastness of the Milky Way and beyond, we can get an inkling of our own smallness, we who cling to this cosmic dust-mote. We expose the illusion that we are really in control of anything, except our decision to care! The infinity of space ignites our appreciation for mystery. In a world lit by fire the nocturnal sky-scape and the limited reach of the campfire offered our ancestors a nightly contemplative touchstone to put the day’s troubles and triumphs into perspective.

Without this long view back through time we so easily forget where we came from, and we overlook just how long it took to get here. We forget that here is always moving. When the cosmos revolves our own ideas we are blind to the infinite encircling miracle. Instead we equate value with quantity; what counts is what WE can count. (As the Psalmist says, count the stars if you can.) We even tally our own lives and dedicate our days to categorizing and enumerating, defining and classifying. We may claim a great intelligence, yet it seems we fail to recognize the difference between knowing and understanding (standing under) our shared reality.

Living under the buzzing glare of neon and the incessant buzz of ideas and images, we fall prey to our own self-deceptions. Motivated by polarizing ideologies we crudely dissect One Planet, One God One People, One life into competing camps. Our conversation (dance) with LIFE becomes one endless run-on that lacks the punctuation of quiet, dark space in which to listen and know and relate, and come to understanding. Without the humbling, stumbling of candlelight, we lose an appreciation for discretion, the dancing shadows, the half-light, the shades and tones of truths were imagination comes out to play. We must be very careful, because when justice and hubris meet we can expect only the heavy hand of self-righteousness (the rightness of might). And when peace and pride embrace they masquerades as triumphalism.

Listening is the highest form of love- Paul Tillich

Perched on the precipice of global catastrophe, we need the wisdom borne of patient listening, that is a kind of unlearning (putting down our own ideas). Otherwise we default to relying on the same devices that have brought us to the brink of disaster. It’s hard enough to convince someone to turn off the overhead lights, let alone invite people to humbly turn to one another, and extinguish our own head lights in order to make space for holy darkness and listen to the wisdom of the ages.

The Story of the Star People! (Unwritten)Ancient wisdom for our time

This is an hour of change.
Within it we stand uncertain, on the border of light.
Shall we draw back, or cross over?
Where shall our hearts turn?
Shall we draw back my brother, my sister, or cross over?
This is the hour of change, and within it we stand quietly together on the border of light. What lies before us?
Shall we draw back my brother and sister, or cross over?
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)

Can we turn off the lights and listen?

2. Recognize the Crisis of Spirit!

Thomas Merton writes: “We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been.”

I wonder: In a universe of infinite possibilities how on earth
did we end up with this one?
These are troubling times indeed (walk the streets of Mumbai, Managua, Port–au-Prince, Basra, New Orleans, Tijuana, Nairobi, downtown Louisville…).We ought to be deeply disturbed. If you know people who are untroubled, pinch them, because clearly they are not awake! These troubles should be interfering with more than our sleep. They need to get under our skin and disturb our life patterns, our habits and expectations. We who are fashioned in the image of God (who have been brought forth from the dark and deep imagination of the infinite heart of the cosmos) are facing such a crisis of spirit that the lives of God’s children’s children hang in the balance.

Spirituality could be described as that deep motivating force that defines the quality of our lives… come what may! Spirituality is never a private matter. It informs our social order and vice versa. In fact the human communities we create reveal the state of our soul. (Pilgrim walking on the edge of the road... a praying people would never leave s this behind…)
The quality of our relationships, our stance toward life in general, is a reflection of what lies within us. If we could only realize that we are enspirited people learning how to be human, perhaps we would “re-source” our spirits to address this crisis. And we do have tremendous spiritual resources precisely for such times… resources that re-directed us back to the source, the font of our dreams and the source of our hope.

What moves you deeply, guides your thoughts, shapes your actions?
Jesus admonished us to set our hearts on God’s Reign and God’s Justice, for where our hearts are our treasure will be. What lies at the heart and center of your life? Where is your passion… suffering-joy?

When possible, on Sunday mornings I walk to church. It is a spiritual practice I enjoy, especially because, at first glance, my neighborhood is neither beautiful nor inspiring.
In fact I live in a “drive-through” part of town. After 14 years I am still disturbed and upset by the neglect and abuse I witness every day in this maligned patch of Eden. I have even been rebuked by well-intentioned police officers for living in the “wrong part of town.” I am aware too, that how I respond to this, my neighborhood is simply a reflection of what lies in me. When I intentionally open my eyes, purposefully pay attention and take the time, I am always amazed. You know there’s is a mocking bird who assaults me with song and a chattering gaggle or sparrows that live alongside the stench of the recycling station. Moved by these encounters, I wonder out loud: if had the wings and opportunity I’d choose a prettier place where the songs would be appreciated. Then I think of how this neighborhood would be without them. And I remember too why I choose this place to be in. The point here is that the Gospel Spirit calls out of our cave, down from the mountain, and into places that may at first seem desolate (like a desert). The work of the Gospel happens here (the Gospel works here… on us and in us)… and in here too. Without practicing peace of mind and heart, I overlook the music in the bushes, or worse still fail to notice the hint of Christ in the stranger’s eyes.

The practice of Gospel Justice and Peace starts from here on out! Every day of our lives we need to practice exposing our hearts and opening our minds to the peaceful center of our lives eve as we walk the concrete desert littered with all the society has cast away.

To be created in the image of God is to come into this world with a spiritual center
that is an avenue for divine wisdom.
To find this center, listen to the silence.
Remember to imagine, to dream, to envision, to create.
Recognize this internal beauty as the holy within your being.
Act as if you are worthy of divine command.
To be created in the image of God is to be grated a great gift.
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)
Do we recognize our spiritual crisis?

3. Raise Your Gaze and Be Amazed!

The popular historian Howard Zinn commented: What we choose to emphasize will determine our perspective.

I wonder: Could we be seriously vision impaired?
This question is illustrated well by an old Jewish Midrash (Lawrence Kushner- adapted):
Now in those days, among the chosen people who wandered into the desert with Moses were two characters, Reuven and Shimon. And like you and me, they were accomplished complainers. So as they walked across the Red Sea, the great miracle of the parting of the waters was lost on them, because the whole time they kept their eyes on the ground. Without ever lifting their gaze they noticed only that the ground beneath their feet was muddy –like a beach at low tide.
“Oi-veh! This mud, its terrible!” complains Reuven.
“Don’t talk to me about mud!” retorts Shimon. “Up to my ankles, I am in all this filth.” “Well, you know what this reminds me of.” cries Reuven.
“Do I know? How could I know?” Shimon responds, “Except this I know, when we were in Egypt we had to make bricks out of mud like this.”
“You know what I think?” Reuven adds, “There’s no difference between being a slave in Egypt and being free here!”
And so Reuven and Shimon went on complaining the whole way across the bottom of the sea. For them there are no miracles, only mud.
And the Talmud reminds us: We don’t really see things as they are. We see things as we are.

When we turn out the light, pay attention, and tune into silence, we become aware (amid all the analysis and speculation), that we are suffering from a catastrophic failure of imagination. More than ever before, we need a vision to penetrate the haze, insight to see through the dark!

I have attended a good many Peace and Justice events. Most of them have focused on the tangled world-wide web of violence and greed. Rather than feeling enlightened I usually leave with the weight of the world on my shoulders. While we have become experts at injustice, we have failed miserably to present (especially to our young people) an exciting imaginable alternative. Granted, we cannot afford to disregard the cruel cost of living paid by our impoverished sisters and brothers … nor can we allow these grim realities to consume us. But it is easier to be mesmerized by injustice than to allow our lives to be illuminated by the Gospel vision of good news and the creative imagination of God’s dream.

There is ancient wisdom that chastises us: You are where your thoughts are, so make certain your thoughts are where you want to be! We cannot afford to simply bemoan the darkness. Far too often the vital spark of God’s dream fails to ignite us because we are wallowing in the violence and oppression that surrounds us on all sides.

Sometimes it seems like the world as we know it is falling apart… thanks be to God!
So I wonder, what does peace and justice look like, feel like to you?
Can I imagine a better world than this? Am I hungry for good news, hoping for change?
How much of my life’s energy do I dedicate to dreaming and scheming, wishing and hoping and praying and waiting for a vision of a world re-born?

When will justice come?
Justice will come when those of us who are not injured are as indignant as those of us who are. (Greek Proverb)

Sometimes it feels like I’m being consumed just trying to keep up with this consumptive life. Or could it be that I’m so invested in the way things are that I’m unable to conceive of any other way of being human? At these times it all looks like mud to me… And usually that happens when I’ve forgotten to look up at be amazed when I’ve forgotten that God is the agent of creation and transformation... the One whom Rabbi Heschel called the most moved mover!

There is a saying in the Jewish Kabbalah which teaches:
All things are in heaven save one: whether (or not) we choose to be reverent.

If this is so, then let’s commit to NOT being transfixed by the powers of darkness; by not taking ourselves too seriously; by believing in the greatness of the small; by letting go our need to win; and getting free enough to respond to life with reverence and to love with abandon.

Steady yourself. Living takes time.
Every moment is a moment to be lived.
Patience, steady.
Rush and race banish joy and peace
There is wonder to experience if you take the time.
Step softly and deliberately.
To force the natural rhythms of life is to deny the divine wisdom in each experience.
(Adapted form the Jewish Shabbat Prayers)

Will you raise your gaze to be amazed?

4. Be Still In the Storm!

There is an indigenous proverb which teaches: When the river runs fast, sit still in your canoe.

I wonder: What’s the first thing you do when you can’t see where you’re going?
Gandhi once remarked that there is more to life than speeding it up! When was the last time you confirmed a date with a friend without having to check your calendar or plan a month in advance? Doesn’t it seem that our plates are too full while at the same time one-in-six children of God on our planet have empty plates? I believe the two realities are intimately interconnected. In our frenzy we forget that starvation is a form of genocide. Do you remember those days when we argued about whether we should acquiesce to cultural pressures and buy an answering machine? Nowadays people are physically attached to communications devices so that they respond to signals from somewhere else, while ignoring the reality and relationships right under their feet. What would our ancestors think of us? How will our children’s children judge us?

The terrible storm brewing in the atmosphere has been whipping up for several generations. We are all part of the environmental catastrophe that has already laid a heavy burden on the improvised people of the underbelly of our world. As the pace of the storm quickens so we rise, panic and try by all means to save ourselves. When fear is our motivator we quickly collapse into ruthlessness.

“Jesus, don’t you care that we are going to drown?” He awoke and cried out:
BE STILL!

Pope John Paul II reminded us that war is a complete failure of our faith and our humanity. As the resources of God’s planet (the God of all) are wantonly depleted (oil, water, food, energy) is it inevitable that we should collapse into factional fighting? Such are the dystopian images of a violent society caught up deadly global competition.

But wait…take a breath… re-source and recollect…
Rabbi Heschel says: God is not always silent and people are not always blind!

Let us not forget that we are God’s people and this is God’s universe. Justice takes time. We need to take the longer view, to resource ourselves for the long haul. As Dr. King taught: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends… toward Justice.” We cannot be sure, we can only believe! But, if we take the time to still ourselves, we come to experience God as the center of the universe. Then in the eye of the storm we stumble upon the love force that holds all things together. Because justice is God’s desire, and mercy is God’s nature, this is precisely what God teases out of us in stillness, in silence, in solitude.

Sabbath is where we meet God not in space but in time. At the eye of life’s storms there is sacred time, that God has opened up… time to rest, to trust, to celebrate and experience life together; time to laugh and cry play and work and wonder, to love and let go. This is what life is for. And for all our busyness, we may be running away from living and opting for surviving. As they used to call it: dying of consumption. The human task, because we are children of God, is to live from this center, God-With us (in Latin cumtemplum- with temple). When we live form our center, we activate contemplation in all the aspects of our lives. This is what it means to be gracious in a state of grace, a little bit of heaven.

Lead us from the unreal into the real… faith, spirituality are not an escape from the demands and rigors and losses and tragedies of life… they are a gateway into them.
Consider the recent witness of the saffron-robed column of Buddhist monks in Burma who walked calmly into the fury of the military regime chanting: “Let everyone be free from harm. Let everyone be free from anger. Let everyone be free from hardship.”

Storms too are holy ground- the place where faith and spirits are tested, where are forced to seek out the shelter of Sabbath that makes things holy. Do we presume abundance or arm ourselves for scarcity? Do we share resources (especially time and presence) or do we hoard and consume with avarice? The choice is ours ad as are the consequences. Let us pray for the patient urgency of the prophets and make the commitment to slow down, stop running around and be still.

Weave a silence into our minds
Weave a silence onto our lips
Weave a silence over our hearts.
Calm us O Lord as you stilled the storm.
Still us O Lord and keep all from harm.
Let all tumult within us cease.
Enfold us Lord in your peace.
(Celtic Prayer –unknown authorship)
Do we dare to be still in the storm?

5. Dance In the Dark!

As Dorothy Day challenges us When we really come to know the seriousness of our situation, the racism, the war, the injustice, we recognize that it not going to remedied just by demonstrations, but by living our lives in dramatically different ways…

I wonder: when was the last time your heart was broken?
It was early in the morning, before the sun had come up over the hills of Nyange parish in Rwanda. I awoke to the distant singing. At the edge of the road I peered down the valley into the gloom and I was told: “The widows and orphans are coming to speak with you.” As the shadows shortened, I glimpsed in the columns of colorful people chanting as they twirled umbrellas and sang. They we walking in single file along narrow paths that skirted both sides of the green valley. “Why are they singing?” I asked the resident priest. “They sing,” he said (quoting an old African proverb) “to know that they are not alone.”

Pass the rock: Touching genocide -Dancing with the widows and the orphans.

Suffering is a necessary party of being alive. (My dad says: “I’ll know I’m the day that nothing hurts). In addition to this there is so much more unnecessary suffering that ought to break our heats and brings us to our knees.

When we spend time with people who are familiar with the dark surely we will have our heart’s broken. Here we come eyelash to eyelash with the scandal of a broken God. A God defamed and abused who suffers-with us. At this point we recognize that love hurts, that’s why we call it passion. It hurts because we only truly love the very act of letting it go (our health, our youth, our parents, our children, our very lives). It is in our suffering-loving that we express our God-likeness. You will know this well, if you’ve been invited into this intimacy with human suffering. It changes you forever. It breaks open your heart. And with the outpouring of lament and sorrow there is finally an opening for joy. We must learn the dark dance of lament- how to hold onto those whom life has mutilated, and grieve for all that has been unrealized, defamed and destroyed. Finally we are free of callous cold heartedness. The Spirit of Jesus is raucous, fiery, liberating forces that disturbs our peace to set free those in bonds of boredom and cynicism by linking them with their brothers and sisters chained to addictions, sexual slavery and starvation…And then we will all be free and then we will sing and then we will dance and laugh. And we will know that joy is the single infallible sign of the presence of God-with-us.

The tomb is opened so we all can enter. And all of us must enter tomb or cave; to face the suffering that will catch up with us; to come to terms with evil in us and around us;; and in real ways come face to face with the harsh tragedy that living and loving requires of us; to find our backs against the wall. And there, once we accustom ourselves to the dark and the quiet we will encounter a presence (the wall is God)… that draws us out and into the light.

There is dignity here we will exalt it.
There is courage here we will support it.
There is humanity here we will enjoy it.
There is a universe in every child we will share in it.
There is a voice calling through the chaos of our times.
There is a Spirit moving across the waters of the world.
There is a movement, a light a promise of hope.
(P.Andrews)
Are you ready to dance into the darkness?

6. Mend the Gap

There is a cult, an idolatry of action. There is an idolatry, a cult of prayer.
The first is mad escape, the second a consumer item, a narcotic.
Each taken alone, activism, passivism, without the other, is hardly recognizable as a human activity; the activists grow sour, violence prone; the meditators dwell on the moon, lunar. The question is not merely one of integrating these two. The question is how to recover each of these two, shapeless, defamed and lost: meaningless action and pointless prayer. Daniel Berrigan

I wonder: what would happen if the doers prayed and the prayers did?
You can tell the people who pray and the ones who don’t! You can what people care about by where they locate their lives. The friendships we nurture will determine the depth our discipleship. As Jesus reminded his followers… whatever you did for the least.
True prayer changes everything because we allow it to change us from the inside out. Everything changes when our perspective, our vision changes. What we see depends on what we we’re looking for. (Trees in the sunshine)

It is our life’s task to locate our lives in the gap between love for God and love for our neighbor. How else are we healed of schizophrenic living that splits one love in two? Essentially they are the same love and neither can be without the other.
Hear O People… God is one, and you shall love one God with one complete love.

God hungers for full communion- all of us, all together, all the time. This is the meaning of integrity. This is holiness, the fruit of mystical awareness- to uncover the oneness that permeates our ordinary divided awareness.

But how do we do this? By weaving networks of relationships and care, reverence and solidarity justice and mercy, we transform our prayer into action and our actions into prayer. “Follow me and you will be catchers of people!” Forever like the Catcher in the Rye, we weave safety nets to catch each other, and bring things back form the precipice the margins and into the center. This is how we touch God and enter into Holy Communion. In Christ there is no spirit of holy isolation! The spirit force that draws us together is a spirit of integration not segregation. God’s love is not divided but is poured out to all shaken, pressed down, in overflowing measure as seeps into the cracks and broken live where is most needed. And our task… not to get in the way, or try to impede the free flow but let it sweep us off our feet and get caught up in this divine extravagance.

We cannot deal with the wounds of this blest and broken world, unless we are inspired by its wonders. The wonders are illuminated when awe dare to reach into this world’s wounds. Like Thomas, when we encounter a wounded stranger we respond: “My Lord and my God!”
If the word were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be a problem.
But I arise in the morning torn
between a desire to save the world and to savor it.
That makes it hard to plan the day.
(E.B. White)
Summary
“Certainly, it is easier to believe now that the sun warms us, and we know that buds will appear on the trees in the wasteland across the street, that life will spring out of the dull clods of that littered park across the way. There are wars and rumors of war, poverty and plague, hunger and pain. Still, the sap is rising, again there is the resurrection of spring, and God's continuing promise to us that He is with us always, with His comfort and joy, if we will only ask." Dorothy Day

By his dying and rising Jesus released that powerful liberating spirit, who makes of us good news, who opens blinded eyes, who takes away all that divides us and sets prisoners free, who declares that this is God’s universe, redeemed not abandoned. In our living, in our dying and in our rising we belong to God. We all belong to God, we all belong together. We long to belong to God together.

Let us rinse out our eyes!
Darkness is a necessary dimension of reality, a crucible of change where new things take shape. We spend half our lives in the dark- the darkness of the womb and of sleep, the darkness of our losses and longings, of alienation, absence and death. Darkness compels us to reach out to others, to gather around the fire, to come to terms with mystery and all that remains unresolved. We do not need to be wise to see in the dark, but we do need to have suffered, to have lost to have listened. Like Merton we need to practice seeing this world with rinsed eyes, because darkness is only the half of it. Jesus came into this world to throw the darkness into relief, in the love-light of a longsuffering God. And each morning we awaken to a nuclear blast of light, piercing the darkness at 180 thousand miles per second broadcasting the mystery, the gift and the awe of it all. Blindly we overlook the miracle and fail to be astonished.

This Dark Age is our time of awakening.
On the first day God created a different kind of darkness by mixing light into the primordial darkness. Therefore there is light even when darkness seems deepest. The smallest amount of light banishes the absolute of darkness, yet no amount of darkness can eliminate the tiniest spark of light. In every dimension of life, even in cruelty and tragedy cruel God is somehow manifest, especially when we feel most alone.

This is our time to wake up, to risk ridicule and persecution by choosing astonishment and gratitude over self righteousness or cynicism. Every Dark Age gives birth to new awakenings. God knows we could use the light! Surely this is OUR time. If we choose together to walk away from small-minded thinking and closed-hearted living, and spend time in the dark together, we might just begin to see our way clear to that love-light our world so desperately needs.
Pray as if everything depended on God.
Act as if everything depends on you.
Spiritual Re-sourcing for the vision-impaired:
• turn of the lights and listen
• resist the urge to blame
• ask questions and question answers
• share struggles
• be grateful for all of it, sunrises and sufferings
• kindle a flame and gather around it
• recover a sense of wonder and respect for mystery

God wants our heart, all of it. In the end there is no God-without-us! God wants us all of us...together… God-together-with-us. Do not be afraid! Peace with you! Be Bold- these times will require nothing less of us.

When it was evening on the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked, for fear of the authorities. Jesus appeared, stood among them and said: “Peace be with you”. He showed them his and his side and said to them again: “Peace be with you!” As God has sent me so I am sending you. He breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

THY Kingdom come, THY will be done unto us and through us … Amen

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's Lasp Speech, April 3, 1968

2008-04-04T13:31:00.001-04:00

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.:

Introduction
Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate say something good about you. And Ralph is the best friend that I have in the world.

I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.

Body of speech
As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?"-- I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land.

And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding--something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee--the cry is always the same--"We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that he's allowed me to be in Memphis.

I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.

And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.

Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.

Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: we know it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.

We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round." Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.

That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing. "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.

Now we've got to go on to Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us Monday. Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

We need all of you. And you know what's beautiful to me, is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It's a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor."

And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he's been to jail for struggling; but he's still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Rev. Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit. But I want to thank them all. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren't concerned about anything but themselves. And I'm always happy to see a relevant ministry.

It's alright to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's alright to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's alright to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nation in the world, with the exception of nine.

Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda--fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy--what is the other bread?--Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take you money out of the banks downtown and deposit you money in Tri-State Bank--we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now there are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

Closing remarks
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base.

Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.

Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop.

At times we say they were busy going to church meetings--an ecclesiastical gathering--and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the casual root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort.

But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass."

And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?".

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do no stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood--that's the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said.

I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze.

Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say that threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

New Book About the Dalai Lama by Pico Ayer

2008-03-27T09:20:00.001-04:00

Books
Holy Man
What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?
by Pankaj Mishra

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

As Pico Iyer writes in his new book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama” (Knopf; $24), it is easy to imagine that the Dalai Lama is “the plaything of movie stars and millionaires.” Certainly, like all those who stress the importance of love, compassion, gentle persuasion, and other unimpeachably good things, the Dalai Lama can appear a bit dull. Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room.”

His simple-Buddhist-monk persona invites skepticism, even scorn. “I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” Rupert Murdoch has said. Christopher Hitchens accuses the Dalai Lama of claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and of enforcing “one-man rule” in Dharamsala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that serves as a capital for the more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile. The Chinese government routinely denounces him as a “splittist,” who is plotting to return Tibet to the corrupt feudal and monastic rule from which Chinese Communists liberated it, in 1951. Many Tibetans in exile grumble that he is too attached to nonviolence, and too much in the grip of Western event coördinators, to prevent the Chinese from colonizing Tibet.

But the events of recent weeks are a reminder of the fervor he inspires among the six million ethnic Tibetans. It was a protest on the forty-ninth anniversary of his exile that led to the current civil unrest in Lhasa; the initial peaceful demonstrations met with a predictably harsh response from the Chinese authorities. As the prominent Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong acknowledges, “Virtually all Tibetans have the Dalai in their hearts.” And the more that their economic prospects and traditional culture are undermined by Han Chinese immigration, the more this long-distance reverence is likely to grow.

Iyer writes that “the heart and soul, quite literally, of the Dalai Lama’s life existed precisely in parts that most of us couldn’t see.” His arduous daily regimen begins at 3:30 A.M., after which he proceeds, as he told Iyer, to “meditation, prostration, reciting special mantras, then more meditation and more prostrations, followed by reading Tibetan philosophy or other texts; then reading and studying and, in the evening, ‘some meditation—evening meditation—for about an hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep.’ ”

This sounds like a lot of meditation and reading for a monk in his seventies—especially someone who, beginning at the age of six, underwent a gruelling education for nearly two decades in Buddhist metaphysics, Tibetan art and culture, logic, Sanskrit, and traditional medicine, and eventually secured a geshe degree (roughly equivalent to a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy). But Buddhist spiritual practice is relentlessly exacting. “Strive on diligently” were the Buddha’s last words, and even the Dalai Lama can’t presume to have reached a summit of wisdom and serenity. It is his fairy-tale childhood that exalts him above most mortals. Born in 1935 to a family of farmers in the outer reaches of the Tibetan cultural domain, he was a two-year-old toddler when a search party of monks from Lhasa identified him as the potential reincarnation of the recently deceased Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Rainbows arcing across the northeastern skies of Lhasa were among the colorful portents that alerted the monks to his presence. In 1939, the child was brought ceremonially from his mud-and-stone house to Lhasa, and given the run of the marvellously labyrinthine Potala Palace.

The Dalai Lama learned calligraphy by copying out his predecessor’s will—which, in its prophetic cast, is one of the spookiest documents in Tibetan history. It was written in 1932, when Tibet, after centuries of uneasy coexistence with its big neighbor in the East, enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. Mao Zedong’s Communists were still far from winning their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Nevertheless, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama sensed that Tibet’s isolation would soon be shattered by “barbaric red Communists”:

Our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated. Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased. . . . The Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away. . . . We will become like slaves to our conquerors . . . and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.

Even if the Dalai Lama shared his predecessor’s forebodings, he couldn’t do much about them. In the Potala Palace, he lived perilously close to the dark intrigues and conspiracies that had undermined his predecessors, and exposed Tibet’s weakness to its overbearing neighbors. The Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Dalai Lamas died young, some rumored to have been poisoned. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who barely escaped an assassination attempt allegedly by his own regent, recognized his insular country’s vulnerability to the highly organized empires and nation-states of the modern world. But his plans for upgrading the Tibetan administration and Army were thwarted by a monastic élite that lived off the labor and taxes of peasants and fought brutally to preserve the status quo. In 1934, shortly after the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death, the reformist politician Lungshar was punished by an ancient Tibetan method of blinding: the knucklebones of a yak were pressed on both of his temples to make his eyeballs pop out.

In 1947, the Dalai Lama, then eleven years old, watched from the Potala Palace through a telescope as monks shot at the Tibetan Army. The weeks-long battle had been sparked by the arrest of his former regent, and it killed dozens. Finally, in 1950, he assumed full political authority as the Dalai Lama. But he had no time to heed his predecessor’s warnings against Tibetan apathy. The Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army had invaded Eastern Tibet and was standing poised to overrun the rest of the country. A decade later, the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans were forced into exile.

The story that the Dalai Lama himself emphasizes to his Western audience is that of his initiation into the modern world—both its vicious ideologies and its redemptive knowledge of science and democratic governance. This intellectual journey is what principally interests Iyer, a novelist, travel writer, and contributor to Time, who has written incisively on the dawning of our present moment in history “in which almost every culture could access every other.” He presents the Dalai Lama as a heartening product of the same encounters between the old and the new, the East and the West, that have stung many other tradition-minded people around the world into a reactionary fundamentalism.

“In Tibet, the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism,” Iyer writes. “Now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having travelled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.” Iyer marshals a variety of evidence for the Dalai Lama’s forward-looking program. The Tibetan leader cast doubt on his divine ancestry, pointing to his premature endorsement of the founder of the Aum Shinrikyo group, which released sarin gas in Tokyo subways, as an indication that he is not a “living Buddha.” The most famous Buddhist in the world, he advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned.

In his public appearances before English-speaking audiences, he prefers to speak of “global ethics” rather than of the abstruse Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Doubtless he doesn’t want to put off the largely secular middle-class Americans in weekend casuals who crowd Central Park to listen to him, but, as Iyer points out, this is also a reaffirmation of a Buddhist philosophical vision in which all existence is deeply interconnected. Indeed, this notion may be why the Dalai Lama was early to grasp the existential and political challenges of globalized human existence, decades before they were underlined by the disasters of climate change.

“For the first time in history,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1957, “all peoples on earth have a common present. . . . Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.” Arendt feared that this new “unity of the world” would be a largely negative phenomenon if it wasn’t accompanied by the “renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed.”

As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition—of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion. Such is his influence that a curt decree from him in the past weeks could have triggered a massive, probably uncontrollable, uprising in Tibet. Yet he continued to reject violence as unethical and counterproductive, even threatening to resign from his position as head of the government-in-exile, in Dharamsala, if Tibetan violence against the Chinese persisted. Increasingly, he has been forced to walk a difficult rhetorical line, accusing China of “cultural genocide” while still supporting its stewardship of the Olympic Games. He has consistently disapproved of even relatively modest attempts to influence the Chinese government, including hunger strikes and economic boycotts. In his view, Tibet needs good neighborly relations with China: “One nation’s problems can no longer be satisfactorily solved by itself alone,” he has said. He bravely promotes “universal responsibility” to people who want to be citizens of their own country before they start thinking about the universe.

He speaks remorsefully about Tibet’s retrograde and self-serving ruling élite in the pre-Communist period, and the country’s fatal lack of preparation for the twentieth century. For the Tibetan community in exile, he has introduced a democratic constitution and legislative elections. Recently, he offered his most radical idea yet, one that overturns nearly half a millennium of tradition: that the next Dalai Lama be chosen by popular vote.

The Dalai Lama’s awareness, deepening over decades of exile, of the high costs of Tibetan isolationism has helped turn Dharamsala into an exemplary cosmopolitan community, where young Israelis coming off compulsory military duty mingle with freshly arrived refugees from Tibet. Still, it seems remarkable today that the boy who once perched upon a golden throne in a thousand-room palace has become an icon of “globalism”—the word Iyer uses, occasionally a bit broadly, to denote the decidedly mixed blessings of speedy communications and easeful travel. After all, the Dalai Lama’s only consistent lifeline to the metropolitan West when growing up had been the magazine Life. (He moved on to Time and to the BBC.) Regular exposure to Henry Luce’s periodicals did not, however, inoculate the Dalai Lama against Maoism. Visiting China in 1954, during a period of uneasy collaboration with Beijing, the Dalai Lama declared himself to be impressed by the Chinese Revolution. Charmed by Mao’s unassuming demeanor, he was startled when the Great Helmsman announced on their last meeting that “religion is a poison”—the belief that, over the next two decades, helped the Chinese justify killing thousands of Tibet’s monks and destroying most of its monasteries.

Arriving in India in 1959, the Dalai Lama was still, Iyer points out, “an innocent in the ways of the modern world.” He did not visit the United States until 1979, and then his highly technical discourses on Buddhist philosophy baffled his listeners, especially those accustomed to the brisk epiphanies of Zen, the Buddhist tradition in vogue at the time. No celebrity glamour attended the Dalai Lama’s initial visits to the country where he was to achieve his greatest fame. The Dalai Lama’s Western fan club began to grow only after he received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989.

His popularity seems to have been helped, at least partly, by a romantic idea of Tibet promoted in the nineteen-thirties by James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon,” an account of Westerners chancing upon Shangri-La, a valley near the Himalayas populated by a harmonious and pacifist society. Frank Capra’s movie version of 1937 (which inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to anoint his Presidential retreat in Maryland Shangri-La, before the prosaic Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed it Camp David, for his grandson) opens with the lines “In these days of wars and rumors of wars, haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?” Despite an ample Tibetan history of brutality, Tibetans are still primarily seen in the West as a blessedly premodern people, who naturally possess rather than pursue happiness.

Iyer acknowledges this romantic misconception as a political problem for Tibet: “It feels—or we need to make it feel—more like Shangri-La than a place that could have a seat at the United Nations.” Often, too, the Dalai Lama seems ready to oblige. His decision to simplify and secularize Buddhist teachings has brought him a much bigger audience than the Japanese Zen masters or the Tibetan sages, such as Allen Ginsberg’s guru Chögyam Trungpa, who preceded him to the West. But the gentrification of an ancient and often difficult philosophy has not been achieved without some loss of intellectual rigor. In best-selling books by the Dalai Lama, Buddhism can appear to be a ritual-free mental workout, but the form that religion takes for the geshe student cramming the three hundred and twenty-two volumes of the Tibetan Buddhist canon is considerably more severe.

The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience. Still, there are some limits to the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, however mindful he is of contemporary liberal sensibilities. He supports full legal rights for all minorities, including gay men and women. But, citing Tibetan texts, he remains disapproving of oral and anal sex. (“The other holes don’t create life.”) Disapproving of sexual laxity and divorce, he can sometimes sound like a family-values conservative.

None of his compromises, however, have aroused as much bitterness as his decision, first announced in 1988, to settle for Tibet’s “genuine autonomy” within China rather than press for full independence. As the Dalai Lama sees it, countries must pursue their interests without harming those of others, and Tibetan independence, in addition to being an unrealistic ideal, needlessly antagonizes Beijing. This stance has failed, however, to convince the Chinese that he is not a “splittist”; they have accused him of having “masterminded” the latest disturbances. It has also made many Tibetans suspect that what makes the Dalai Lama more likable in the West—mainly, his commitment to nonviolence, reiterated during the current crisis—makes him appear weak to the Chinese.

“The more he gave himself to the world,” Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel “like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.” The Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu complains that Tibetan support groups and the government-in-exile have become “directionless” in trying to “reorient their objectives around such other issues as the environment, world peace, religious freedom, cultural preservation, human rights—everything but the previous goal of Tibetan independence.”

Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people.

As China grows unassailable, it is easy to become pessimistic about Tibet, and to imagine its spiritual leader becoming increasingly prey to fatalism. The Dalai Lama’s retreat from the exclusivist claims of ancestral religion and the nation-state can seem the reflex of someone who, since he first copied out his predecessor’s prophecy, has helplessly watched his country’s landmarks disappear. The bracing virtue of Iyer’s thoughtful essay, however, is that it allows us to imagine the Dalai Lama as something of an intellectual and spiritual adventurer, exploring fresh sources of individual identity and belonging in the newly united world.

Certainly, Arendt’s “solidarity of mankind,” enforced by capitalism and technology, has become, as she observed, “an unbearable burden,” provoking “political apathy, isolationist nationalism, or desperate rebellion against all powers that be.” There are few things that Tibetans lashing out at the Chinese presence in Lhasa today fear more than absorption into the ruthless new economy and culture of China. Iyer’s book makes it plausible that the boy from the Tibetan backwoods may be outlining, in his own frequently Forrest Gumpish way, “a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale”—the process that Arendt believed necessary for halting the “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else.” It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet. Such, however, are the advantages of being a simple Buddhist monk that he is less likely—indeed, less able—than most politicians to compromise his noble ends with dubious means, even as he, following the Buddha’s deathbed exhortation, diligently strives on. ♦

Many Muslims Turn to Home Schooling

2008-03-26T09:23:00.001-04:00

March 26, 2008
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

LODI, Calif. — Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home.
Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.
“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes — they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”
Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards. But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.
About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled, though broader statistics on the number of Muslim children being home-schooled, and how well they do academically, are elusive. Even estimates on the number of all American children being taught at home swing broadly, from one million to two million.
No matter what the faith, parents who make the choice are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home.
“I don’t want the behavior,” said Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose. “Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.”
Still, the subject of home schooling is a contentious one in various Muslim communities, with opponents arguing that Muslim children are better off staying in the system and, if need be, fighting for their rights.
Robina Asghar, a Muslim who does social work in Stockton, Calif., says the fact that her son was repeatedly branded a “terrorist” in school hallways sharpened his interest in civil rights and inspired a dream to become a lawyer. He now attends a Catholic high school.
“My son had a hard time in school, but every time something happened it was a learning moment for him,” Mrs. Asghar said. “He learned how to cope. A lot of people were discriminated against in this country, but the only thing that brings change is education.”
Many parents, however, would rather their children learn in a less difficult environment, and opt to keep them home.
Hina Khan-Mukhtar decided to tutor her three sons at home and to send them to a small Muslim school cooperative established by some 15 Bay Area families for subjects like Arabic, science and carpentry. She made up her mind after visiting her oldest son’s prospective public school kindergarten, where each pupil had assembled a scrapbook titled “Why I Like Pigs.” Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar read with dismay what the children had written about the delicious taste of pork, barred by Islam. “I remembered at that age how important it was to fit in,” she said.
Many Muslim parents contacted for this article were reluctant to talk, saying Muslim home-schoolers were often portrayed as religious extremists. That view is partly fueled by the fact that Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, was home-schooled in rural California.
“There is a tendency to make home-schoolers look like antisocial fanatics who don’t want their kids in the system,” said Nabila Hanson, who argues that most home-schoolers, like herself, make an extra effort to find their children opportunities for sports, music or field trips with other people.
Lodi’s Muslims also attracted unwanted national attention when one local man, Hamid Hayat, was sentenced last year to 24 years in prison on a terrorism conviction that his relatives say was largely due to a fabricated confession. (Had he been more Americanized, they say, he would have known to ask for a lawyer as soon as the F.B.I. appeared.)
Parents who home-school tend to be converts, Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar said. Immigrant parents she has encountered generally oppose the idea, seeing educational opportunities in America as a main reason for coming.
If so, then Fawzia Mai Tung is an exception, a Chinese Muslim immigrant who home-schools three daughters in Phoenix. She spent many sleepless nights worried that her children would not excel on standardized tests, until she discovered how low the scores at the local schools were. Her oldest son, also home-schooled, is now applying to medical school.
In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.
Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.
“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.
Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.
As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.
The parents “want their girls safe at home and away from evil things like boys, drinking and drugs,” said Kristine Leach, a veteran teacher with the Independent School.
The girls follow the regular high school curriculum, squeezing in study time among housework, cooking, praying and reading the Koran. The teachers at the weekly tutorials occasionally crack jokes of the “what, are your brothers’ arms broken?” variety, but in general they tread lightly, sensing that their students obey family and tradition because they have no alternative.
“I do miss my friends,” Miss Bibi said of fellow students with whom she once attended public school. “We would hang out and do fun things, help each other with our homework.”
But being schooled apart does have its benefit, she added. “We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us,” she said, “to say that we are bad.”
Mrs. Asghar, the Stockton woman who argues against home schooling, takes exception to the idea of removing girls from school to preserve family honor, calling it a barrier to assimilation.
“People who think like this are stuck in a time capsule,” she said. “When kids know more than their parents, the parents lose control. I think that is a fear in all of us.”
Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there.
Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

Israel's 'religious right' gains clout, complicating peace with Palestinians

2008-03-22T17:17:00.001-04:00

Israel's 'religious right' gains clout, complicating peace with Palestinians
The Shas Party, a key part of Israel's governing coalition, is pushing settlement growth.
By Ilene R. Prusher Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Givat Zeev, West Bank
On a hilltop far enough from the existing Israeli settlement of Givat Zeev that one needs directions to get here stands the framework of a settlement meant to house up to 750 families.
Eli Yishai stood on an unfinished balcony of one of the new development's shell homes. He's a key coalition partner of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the leader of the religious party Shas, which is feted by some and decried by others for having broken Israel's "settlement freeze."
"The world might want us to freeze, but there's no doubt that we look at it a bit differently," says Mr. Yishai. "We will make this into a continuous, meaningful block connecting this whole corridor to Jerusalem. I see many possibilities to start building again, according to the demands of natural growth."
A new spate of West Bank settlement construction not only complicates efforts to resume Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, but points to a palpable rightward shift in Shas, a party that used to be considered moderate and amenable to the land-for-peace formula on which any solution to the conflict is based.
Israel's announcement last week that it was going to permit the construction of 750 homes here generated criticism from Palestinians and from around the world. The Bush administration reacted by reminding Mr. Olmert that limiting settlement activity is "a road-map obligation" Israel committed itself to as part of the Annapolis Process, referring to last fall's peace talks in Annapolis, Md.
But in what many here say is a move to lure Shas to stay in the governing coalition, which Shas has been threatening on a regular basis to bolt, Olmert decided to remove the barriers to several already-in-the-works settlement projects and to allow Shas to take the credit. If Shas did leave the coalition, the government would lose its majority and fall apart.
The evolution of Shas
Shas's aging spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, once made a ruling that territorial concessions, were they to save lives and lead to true peace between Arabs and Jews, were acceptable under religious law.
Today, however, the young generation of Shas seems to be less concerned with the ideal backdrop for peacemaking and more driven by coalition politics and the demands of their constituents, who will benefit from new homes at relatively inexpensive prices. The neighborhood to be constructed here will be designated for the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute the fastest-growing portion of the West Bank settler population, according to figures from Peace Now and Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.
"There has been a shift, but I think that the main reason is more on the coalition tactical level than the ideological one," says Itzhak Galnoor, a professor of Israeli politics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Now Shas is the most right-wing member of the coalition, since Avigdor Lieberman [of Israel Beitainu] left, and it has to justify to its constituency that it stays in the government."
When the first Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was reached nearly 15 years ago, Shas was a coalition partner of the left-leaning Labor Party. They've been a key piece of the multiparty puzzle in every government since, in large part because their flexible outlook on peacemaking made them an attractive partner. The party's main concern was to win support for towns and schools heavily populated by their supporters, Jews of Middle Eastern origin, or Sephardim, who were long neglected and discriminated against by the Ashkenazi (European) establishment.
But over the past decade, following the Al Aqsa intifada and the breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Shas has swung right. This may be in part an effort by Shas to boost its standing among more nationalist Israeli voters, regardless of ethnic origin. This trend suggests that Shas is working to attract supporters away from the right-wing Likud as well as the National Religious Party, both of which have been socked in recent years with a significant loss of Knesset, or parliament, seats and political prestige.
"Shas was centrist and very mild on settlements, and it has moved because of the people who vote for it," Dr. Galnoor notes. "The leadership has always been more dovish. But in the last 10 years, it has moved to the right." Galnoor says that this may be a kind of positioning ahead of the elections, which are scheduled for 2009 but are likely to be called for next year instead. Shas won 10 seats in the last Knesset elections, down from 14.
"They made a decision that this is where the votes could come from ... and that being a little more right wing couldn't hurt them," Galnoor adds. "It's a gamble in a way, to try and get some of the votes that may otherwise go to the Likud," or other religious parties.
Shlomo Ben-Izri, a Knesset member from Shas and former cabinet minister, says that Shas's ideology has not changed, but that times have. "We're not in a great situation anyway. You can't say that these settlements will be a reason for a renewal of terrorism, because there is terrorism anyway," he says, referring to the recent shooting at a Jerusalem seminary by a Palestinian gunman.
"We go by halacha [religious law] and our spiritual leader, Rabbi Yosef. He supported the Oslo Accords, but only if it will bring real peace," says Mr. Ben-Izri. "But today, after what's happening in and around Gaza, and what's happening on the Palestinian side, we don't see any partner. So it's the peace process we must freeze."
The settlement conundrum
It is hard to know to what extent Shas's settlement drive reflects that of the entire Israeli government, which has been sending mixed signals. Olmert said Monday that Israel would not stop building over the Green Line – Israel's pre-1967 boundaries – in and around Jerusalem. "There will be places where there will be construction, or additions to construction, because these places will remain in Israel's hands."
Palestinians are deeply dismayed by the moves. The Jerusalem-based Al Quds newspaper said in an editorial Tuesday that Olmert's statements are "a challenge to the American criticism, and will lead to more complications in the inactive peace process."
Nabil Abu Rudenieh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, said Israel was undermining US efforts. "The situation needs a frank and clear US position against the settlements policy."
In the cluster of new apartments that have just been finished in the past six months, halfway between the existing Givat Zeev settlement and the new 750-unit neighborhood, a few young couples with children have already moved in. Arielle Peretz, who moved here with her husband two months ago, views infrequent bus service as the only drawback.
"I wouldn't have chosen to move here because it's far from the city," she explains, glancing over her new living room, which looks out to the pretty, terraced hillsides tended by Palestinian neighbors across the valley. "We came because it's so much more expensive to buy in Jerusalem. There will never be peace anyway. How many years have we been fighting?"
}
}

For Arthur C. Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically

2008-03-20T13:45:00.000-04:00

March 20, 2008
An Appraisal
For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90. This may not have surprised anyone who knew that this science-fiction writer, fabulist, fantasist and deep-sea diver had long seen religion as a symptom of humanity’s “infancy,” something to be outgrown and overcome.
But his fervor is still jarring because when it comes to the scriptural texts of modern science fiction, and the astonishing generation of prophetic innovators who were his contemporaries — Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury — Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.
Stanley Kubrick’s film of Mr. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for example — a project developed with the author — is haunting not for its sci-fi imaginings of artificial intelligence and space-station engineering but for its evocation of humanity’s origins and its vision of a transcendent future embodied in a human fetus poised in space.
Even the titles of some of Mr. Clarke’s stories invoke scriptural language. “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth ...” tells of a boy on a lunar colony who is taken out by his father to see their mother planet rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war, an experience that inspires a dream of future return to be passed from generation to generation. In “The Nine Billion Names of God” monks of a Tibetan-like retreat believe that the very purpose of humanity is to write down the nine billion permutations of letters that spell God’s secret name, a project assisted by representatives of an I.B.M.-style company who indulgently supply the equipment so the project can come to its long-awaited close. As the computer experts fly home, “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
Religious symbolism is not always beneficent of course. In what may be Mr. Clarke’s most suggestive and disturbing novel, “Childhood’s End,” an alien race of Overlords, with apparent generosity, establish a utopia on Earth, eliminating human warfare and ushering in an era of plenty. But it is no accident that when the Overlords are finally described they have the appearance of Satanic creatures, complete with “the leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail.”
Whatever attitude comes through — and it is almost always fraught with ambiguity — religion suffuses Mr. Clarke’s realm. He demands the canvas of Genesis and upon it he enacts experiments in thought. All science fiction does this to a certain extent, trying to imagine alternative universes in which one factor or another is slightly different. What if carbon were not the fundamental element in life forms? What if a society existed that never experienced nighttime?
Mr. Clarke’s enterprise, though, is at the edges of the frame: trying to examine the moments when things come to be and when they come to an end. In the short story “Rescue Party” aliens come to save Earth from an imminent solar explosion. They find that humans, a primitive species that had known how to use radio signals for barely 200 years, had already saved themselves, launching a fleet of ships into the stars, knowing their journey would take hundreds of years.
The rescuers are shocked by humanity’s daring and determination. “This is the youngest civilization in the Universe,” one notes. “Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?” The story foretells the dominance of this species even though it is outnumbered by the creatures of the heavens — a dominance that, as Mr. Clarke makes sure we feel, will not always be welcome.
Such apocalypse is the bread and butter of science fiction, but sometimes with Mr. Clarke it is also the communion, the sharing of a moment of transcendence in which some destiny is fulfilled, some possibility opened up. Hence the fetus of “2001.” That transformation may also not be something to be desired by current standards. The prospects are just too alien, like the ineffable Overmind in “Childhood’s End” that propels humanity to a new evolutionary stage, inspiring as much horror as awe.
This side of Mr. Clarke’s work may be the most eerie, particularly because his mystical speculations accompany an uncanny ability to envision worlds that are eminently plausible. It is Mr. Clarke who first conceived of the communication satellites that orbit directly over a single spot on Earth and allow the planet to be blanketed in a network of signals. There are many other examples as well.
But acts of reason and scientific speculation are just the beginning of his imaginings. Reason alone is insufficient. Something else is required. For anyone who read Mr. Clarke in the 1960s and ’70s, when space exploration and scientific research had an extraordinary sheen, his science fiction made that enterprise even more thrilling by taking the longest and broadest view, in which the achievements of a few decades fit into a vision of epic proportions reaching millenniums into the future. It is no wonder that two generations of scientists were affected by his work.
For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.
But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

IPP Board member Tom Williams' Article in Courier-Journal on Merton epiphany anniversary

2008-03-10T15:33:00.004-04:00

The Courier-Journal
Monday, March 10, 2008

On a Merton Anniversary, the challenge to share your epiphany

Our challenge was embodied in the life Thomas Merton. Merton is one of the most influential American spiritual and religious figures of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold many millions of copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over 80 other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights and nonviolence. Yet, you may not know about him other than the little you have heard.
On December 10, 1941, he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of Trappist monks just outside of Louisville. There he was given the name Father Louis. After seventeen years in the monastery, Father Louis, at the age of 43, had a transformational experience in Louisville. The event has been said to have had a ripple effect throughout the world as a mystical awakening in a public setting -- where the sacred enters the everyday. Merton may be most unique as a religious leader for his vision of the divine in the ordinary.
On March 18, 1958, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, now Fourth and Muhammad Ali, Merton had a vision of oneness with all people. He called this vision an "epiphany." An "epiphany" is a sudden sense of revelation that one may feel while perceiving a common event or experience. Merton wrote of his experience:
"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race … there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."
Paradoxically, Merton experienced this transformation when he was out of his everyday monastic life and was immersed in the hustle and bustle of our shopping district -- now Fourth Street Live.
Merton said of his experience, "I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed..."
It has been said that Merton's epiphany set the agenda for the remainder of his life as he wrote about the major issues facing humanity, including racism, religious diversity, war and ecology. If you read his works, you will find that Merton gives us all a message of hope as we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow. But perhaps more inspiring is the way Merton saw the world as a place that freely reveals the higher powers in the everyday and the ordinary -- even ordinary people like you and me.
You see Merton saw the spark of the divine in you. Like a loving father, he saw you as you really are. He saw the depths that you have but don't share. Like a loving father, he saw your secret beauty that you sometimes don't believe yourself. If you really think about it, what a grace-filled blessing this vision is.
So, in honor of Thomas Merton and his vision, we ask that you see yourself as Merton saw you. Discover your epiphany. Once you have this vision, we ask that you share it. Share it with your loved ones; share it with your neighbors or friends; share it with members of your church or mosque or synagogue. Share it with us. Find that "spark of divinity," that moment of transformation, that powerful event that changed you, and then share it with the world like Father Louis did.
But you ask how do you know if you have found your transformational moment? Merton's vision came after a lifetime of prayer, writing and contemplation. It came from the hard bottom of an existence that knew suffering. Merton may have ended his life like a Saint, but it did not begin that way. You will likely know you have found your epiphany if you weep, if you feel joy and lightness or if you see a profound beauty in the everyday -- a profound beauty that you know to the depths of your being. In the end, Merton believed that all of us are mystics -- that we all have these moments of connection with something both deeper and higher. So test Merton's hypothesis in your life -- see your life with the eyes of a mystic.
If you need inspiration for your work, go visit the corner of Fourth and Ali, look at the people and try to see the "secret beauty of their hearts" as did Thomas Merton. Be a Merton pilgrim on the 50th anniversary of his epiphany this March 18th. When you take this pilgrimage to Fourth Street, if you look closely enough, you will find on the granite corner of the Starks Building that faint and remaining outline of the words "Fourth" and "Walnut." These words still stand as the mystical reminder of Merton's vision "[i]n Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district." May this public space that is now transformed into Fourth and Ali be the inspiration for the exploration of your own personal transformation in this "Year of the Epiphany."
I believe that it was no accident that Merton had his epiphany in Louisville -- in our home town. Merton didn't see just anyone. He saw the people of Louisville, Ky. We are a people that know about hospitality and everyday kindness, but we are also a people who come from the deep part of the river that transects and connects our country. We are, you know, a people of the deep but still moving waters of the Falls. So let us make Merton a prophet. Let us find that "secret beauty in our hearts" and let that beauty "shine like the sun" for all to see.
To honor Thomas Merton and his vision of you, we welcome you to share your epiphany with me at tom.williams@skofirm.com .
THOMAS M. WILLIAMS
Immediate Past President,
Louisville Bar Association
Member, Stoll Keenon Odgen
Louisville 40202

Vatican and Muslims to establish permanent dialogue

2008-03-05T16:53:00.000-05:00

Vatican and Muslims to establish permanent dialogue
By Philip PullellaWed Mar 5, 1:46 PM ET
The Vatican and Muslim leaders agreed on Wednesday to establish a permanent official dialogue to improve often difficult relations and heal wounds still open from a controversial papal speech in 2006.
A joint statement said the first meeting of "The Catholic-Muslim Forum" will take place on November 4-6 in Rome with 24 religious leaders and scholars from each side.
Pope Benedict will address the group, the statement said.
The announcement came after a two-day meeting at the Vatican with five representatives of Muslims who had signed an unprecedented appeal to the Pope to begin a dialogue.
"We emerged with a permanent structure that will ensure that the Catholic-Muslim engagement and dialogue continues into the future," said Professor Aref Ali Nayed, director of the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Amman, Jordan.
He told a news conference the forum would be able "to work out issues and an exchange of opinions about important matters."
Catholic-Muslim relations nosedived in 2006 after Benedict delivered a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, that was taken by Muslims to imply that Islam was violent and irrational.
Muslims around the world protested and the pope sought to make amends when he visited Turkey's Blue Mosque and prayed towards Mecca with its Imam.
"For some Muslims the wounds of the (pope's) German lecture are not completely healed and there are some Muslims who are boycotting the Vatican ... and still feel offended by that quite deeply," Nayed said in answer to a question.
PAPAL SPEECH STILL HURTS
"Just because we are part of this initiative does not mean that we are not hurt by this, however we must not only dwell on the negative but also dwell on the positive. There have been some recent positive moves by the Vatican," he said.
After the fallout from the Regensburg speech, 138 Muslim scholars and leaders wrote to the German-born pontiff and other Christian leaders last year, saying "the very survival of the world itself" may depend on dialogue between the two faiths.
"Muslims and Christians make up about 55 percent of the world and there will be no peace in the world unless there is peace between these two communities," Ibrahim Kalin of the Seta Foundation in Turkey told the news conference.
The signatories of the Muslim appeal for dialogue, called the "Common Word," has grown to nearly 240 since.
"This whole initiative is about healing, it is about healing the wounds of a very pained and in many ways destroyed world. We have cruelty all over the place, we have wars, we have famines we have massacres, we have terrorist acts, we have torture, we have people who are kidnapped," Nayed said.
Although Benedict repeatedly expressed regret for the reaction to his speech in Regensburg, he stopped short of a clear apology sought by Muslims.
The Muslim delegation said the forum would meet every two years and alternate between Rome and a Muslim country but would establish structures for regular contacts and links to deal with one member called "an emergency situation."

Why Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is Relevant Today

2008-03-03T15:52:00.001-05:00

Dennis Krausnick is in Louisville as a visiting professor in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Louisville . He is a fine actor and an imaginative director in additon to being the Director of Training at Shakespeare & Company, Lennox MA. In 2006, he was a Bingham Professor at U of L and stayed at our house. Then, he directed a student production of Winter's Tale. This time, he is directing one of Shakespeare's earliest tragedies, Titus Andronicus. It is seldom produced, primarily because it is a bloody, horrific revenge play. He was asked why he chose the play, and he said that it was relevant to today.
We thought you might be interested in the program note he wrote for the playbill:

"Titus Andronicus is compelling at this moment in our history because it addresses a culture of War, a culture we now seem to be mired in and seem, as a nation, to have embraced since the events of 9/11. It also speaks from a situation which involves the clash of radically different cultures (Roman and Goth for the play; Western ( USA , European Judeo/Christian) vs. Fundamentalist Islam).We now live in a culture in which the original source of mistrust is no longer remembered: both sides now want to redress or revenge events in recent memory (attack of 9/11; invasion of Iraq , etc.) For some decades in the 20th century, the actions of Titus (rape, mutilation and violent murder) seemed "over the top." Recently, we have seen people beheaded on television and hear repeatedly about Sharia Law meting out punishments of stoning or lopping of bodily parts; we also have radically different systems of Law (or redress) in which the reactions of one side to the actions of another seem incomprehensible to the opposed side (i.e. the trial and sentencing of a teacher who allowed her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed). Since the early to mid-nineties, rape has become a staple in the weapons of war used in Eastern Europe ( Serbia , Bosnia , Croatia ), in Africa (the Congo , Darfur , Rwanda and several other sites of violent civil reprisal throughout the continent) as well as in the gang wars of our own streets. It continues now in the mid-eastern Arab cultures as well.And finally, I wanted to put this play on right now because I think we've lost the consciousness that we are in fact in a war. The economy has now replaced the war as the primary concern of voters in the current primaries and next year's federal presidential election. And no one alludes to the possibility that our current economic status might be related to the fact that we have spent nearly half a trillion dollars on this war we are no longer focused on and have never accounted for it budgetarily.In the opening scene of the play, Titus' twenty-one sons are honored with burial because they have given their lives for Rome . Rome then proceeds to ignore the sacrifice of these lives and free the prisoners of war. Our own "free press" is not allowed to photograph even the flag-covered caskets of the returning dead. Just as the real reasons for the ten-year war against the Goths (the pillage and plunder brought home to fill Rome's coffers) are ignored within the text of the play, the fact that the US has signed contracts with international oil companies giving them 83 percent of all future oil revenues and leaving only 17 percent for the Iraqi people is never mentioned in the American press (although it does appear in the European press, further reducing the integrity of US actions in the eyes of the rest of the world).The resonances within the play for our contemporary culture are, in my view, nearly unending. I want to produce this statement because I want to be less silent in the face of actions that make me feel helpless and that my voice is unheard.”
-- Dennis Krausnick

How Do You Prove You’re a Jew?

2008-03-03T15:50:00.000-05:00

The New York Times
March 2, 2008

By GERSHOM GORENBERG
One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove — before a rabbinic court, no less — that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she.
Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional with a master’s degree, a job with a major H.M.O. and a partner — when this story starts, a fiancé — who is “in computers.”
This stereotypical biography did not help her any more at the rabbinate than the line on her birth certificate listing her nationality as Jewish. Proving you are Jewish to Israel’s state rabbinate can be difficult, it turns out, especially if you came to Israel from the United States — or, as in Sharon’s case, if your mother did.
In recent years, the state’s Chief Rabbinate and its branches in each Israeli city have adopted an institutional attitude of skepticism toward the Jewish identity of those who enter its doors. And the type of proof that the rabbinate prefers is peculiarly unsuited to Jewish life in the United States. The Israeli government seeks the political and financial support of American Jewry. It welcomes American Jewish immigrants. Yet the rabbinate, one arm of the state, increasingly treats American Jews as doubtful cases: not Jewish until proved so.
More than any other issue, the question of Who is a Jew? has repeatedly roiled relations between Israel and American Jewry. Psychologically, it is an argument over who belongs to the family. In the past, the casus belli was conversion: Would the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew coming to Israel, apply to those converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis? Now, as Sharon’s experience indicates, the status of Jews by birth is in question. Equally important, the dividing line is no longer between Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The rabbinate’s handling of the issue has placed it on one side of an ideological fissure within Orthodox Judaism itself, between those concerned with making sure no stranger enters the gates and those who fear leaving sisters and brothers outside.
Seth Farber is an American-born Orthodox rabbi whose organization — Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center — helps Israelis navigate the rabbinic bureaucracy. He explained to me recently that the rabbinate’s standards of proof are now stricter than ever, and stricter than most American Jews realize. Referring to the Jewish federations, the central communal and philanthropic organizations of American Jewry, he said, “Eighty percent of federation leaders probably wouldn’t be able to reach the bar.” To assist people like Sharon, Farber has become a genealogical sleuth. He is the first to warn, though, that solving individual cases cannot solve a deeper crisis.
Judaism, traditionally, is matrilineal: every child of a Jewish mother is automatically considered a Jew. Zvi Zohar, a professor of law and Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University, told me that in Judaism’s classical view of itself, Jews are best understood as a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God. Those who didn’t practice the faith remained part of the family, even if traditionally they were regarded as black sheep. Converts were adopted members of the clan. Today the meaning of being Jewish is disputed — a faith? a nationality? — but in Israeli society the principle of matrilineal descent remains widely accepted. Sharon’s mother was Jewish, so Sharon knew that she was, too. And yet it seemed impossible to provide evidence that would persuade the rabbinate.
Sharon left the office infuriated. Her mother was Jewish enough to leave affluent America for Israel; her brothers had fought for the Jewish state. Now, she felt, she was being told, “For that you’re good enough, but to be considered Jews for religious purposes you’re not.”
Sharon’s mother, Suzie, is 66, a dance therapist, even tinier than her daughter, a flurry of movement in the living room of her kibbutz bungalow. Suzie’s maternal grandfather, David Ludmersky, was born in Kiev. When he was drafted into the czar’s army, he deserted, fled to America and worked to send a ticket to Rose, the girl he left behind. The Merskys (an Ellis Island clerk shortened the name) moved to the small Wisconsin town of Wausau, where their daughter, Belle (Suzie’s mother), was born. Suzie has heard that they didn’t like the place, that they consulted a fortuneteller, that she told them to move west to Minneapolis. There David Mersky indeed made his fortune, working his way from peddling fruit to owning one of the city’s first supermarkets.
I recount this family history because of its pure American Jewish normality. In Minneapolis, Belle Mersky married Julius Goldstein in a Conservative ceremony. This, too, was typical: Conservative Judaism was the common choice for American Jews leaning toward tradition. Julius’s brother became a Conservative rabbi. Belle and Julius raised their family on Minneapolis’s North Side, “a totally Jewish neighborhood then,” Suzie recalled. She went to Sunday school at Beth El Synagogue, a Conservative congregation.
Suzie began college at the cusp of the 1960s, attending the University of Minnesota, rooming with a friend from a Zionist summer camp. Her uncle, the Conservative rabbi, paid for her to go to Israel one summer on a student tour. When she returned to Israel after graduation, even the motor-scooter accident was practically part of the standard restless-youth experience. She broke her foot, put off her plan to join a dance company and took a room in a Tel Aviv rooming house. “I was sitting there with my foot up, crutches in the corner, and this handsome guy came in,” she told me. He was British. He and his best friend were living in Holland, “wanted to go somewhere” and drove overland to Israel.
“He ended up being my husband,” Suzie said with a laugh. He wasn’t Jewish, a twist in the story line. They left Israel together to wander through Europe and married in a civil ceremony in England. Those details would later loom immense: Had he been Jewish, had they married in Israel, she would have had a ketuba, or religious marriage contract issued by the rabbinate, for her daughter to show years later. In the excitement after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, they decided to return to the country. “He always wanted to live here,” she said, and “we were adventurous.”
Fast forward: Sharon, on her 38th birthday, took the day off from work to make wedding arrangements. First stop was the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court.
The rabbinic courts are an arm of the Israeli justice system. Formally, the judges — rabbis with special training — are appointed on professional grounds. In practice, positions in the courts and in the state rabbinate are parceled out as patronage by religious political parties. The main function of the rabbinic courts is divorce, also a purely religious process in Israel. A secondary function is providing judicial rulings on whether a person is Jewish. For that, the main clientele is immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A fairly standard procedure exists for them. It includes examining Soviet-era documents, like birth certificates, that list a citizen’s nationality. (In the Soviet system, “Jewish” was a nationality, parallel to “Russian” or “Uzbek,” listed in everyone’s official papers.)
At the court, Sharon told me, the clerk who opened her file told her to bring her mother’s birth certificate and her parents’ marriage certificate. “I said: ‘But my mother’s birth certificate doesn’t say “Jewish.” It’s from the United States. They don’t write that. And the marriage license — they had a civil wedding.’ ” After she waited hours to see a judge, he told Sharon to return with “any document that would testify to her mother’s Jewishness.” She asked a court official if a letter from a Conservative rabbi would solve the problem. Her mother has a cousin in Florida who is a rabbi, son of the uncle who originally sent Suzie to Israel. No, the official said, “that won’t help. It has to be someone Orthodox.”
“When Sharon called me, she was crying,” Suzie told me. Her daughter said the court wanted testimony from an Orthodox rabbi who had known Suzie all her life. “Even if there was such a thing, he would be dead by now,” Suzie said. Lacking an official document labeling her a Jew and without a childhood connection to Orthodoxy, Suzie was again a typical American Jew. Nonetheless, she got on the phone. Her cousin in Florida told her to phone a colleague from Israel’s small movement for Conservative Judaism. He, in turn, said Seth Farber would help her. He was right.
Since genealogy is basic to this story, I will point out that Seth Farber’s great-great-great-grandfather was the pre-eminent Central European rabbi Moshe Schreiber, father of ultra-Orthodoxy. My guess is that Rabbi Schreiber would be confused by Farber’s approach to religion. Better known as the Hatam Sofer, or Seal of the Scribe, the name of his work of religious scholarship, he bitterly opposed fitting Judaism to modernity and was known for his principle, “Anything new is forbidden by the Torah.” An iconic portrait shows him with a long gray beard and a fur hat.
Farber, 41, has a round, clean-shaven face and frameless glasses that make him look like an earnest grad student. He grew up in Riverdale, N.Y., attending the kind of Orthodox parochial school that, he told me, “celebrated Americanism,” that turned the American bicentennial into the focus of an entire school year. In college, he maintained that balance of Orthodoxy and integration by cycling the length of Manhattan twice daily: mornings studying Talmud at Yeshiva University on 185th Street, afternoons at New York University for philosophy. He could have done his secular studies as well at the Orthodox university, he said, but he wanted “to understand the broad world, to meet non-Jews, to be exposed to broad ideas” — in short, to span the moat between traditional Judaism and modernity that his ancestor devoted his life to digging.
Farber was ordained as a rabbi at Yeshiva University, and in the mid-90s he moved to Israel. He completed a doctorate at Hebrew University in American Jewish history and started his own synagogue. It was the kind of place that ran a Passover charity drive, collecting the leavened food that religious Jews would normally throw away before the holiday and donating it to a welfare society in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. He also got permission from the state rabbinate to perform weddings.
His organization, Itim, was born of a hike that he and his wife, Michelle, took in a barren gorge through the Judean desert. When they arrived at the gorge, they found they would need ropes to descend the cliffs into the freezing pools along the bottom, and another couple offered to share equipment. Along the way, their hiking companions said they weren’t married because “they couldn’t find a rabbi they could relate to.” Most secular Israelis imagine a rabbi looking more like the Hatam Sofer than the hiker in soaked shorts who offered to perform the ceremony. At the wedding, as nearly the only Orthodox Jew among 600 people, Farber said he began to understand how “disenfranchised” many Jews in Israel feel when dealing with state-run religion.
He decided to “create a place where the representatives of Judaism” aren’t government clerks. Itim distributes booklets that explain to Israelis how to arrange a circumcision, marriage or funeral. It helps secular couples find rabbis sensitive to their desires for their ceremonies. For the last five years, it has run a hot line for Israelis who face trouble in the rabbinic bureaucracy. Early on, Farber began receiving calls from people unable to prove they were Jews. Many were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, but some were Americans. Even a letter from an Orthodox rabbi didn’t always help. The state rabbinate no longer trusts all Orthodox rabbis.
Trust — or lack of it — is the crux. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University explained to me that historically, if someone said he was a Jew, “if he lived among us, was a partner in our society and said he was one of us, we assumed he was right.” Trust was the default position. One reason was that Jews were a persecuted people; no one would claim to belong unless she really did. The leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel in the years before and after the state was established, Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (known as the Hazon Ish, the name of his magnum opus on religious law), held the classical position. If someone arrived from another country claiming to be Jewish, he should be allowed to marry another Jew, “even if nothing is known of his family,” Karlitz wrote.
Several trends have combined to change that. In an era of intermarriage, denominational disputes and secularization, Jews have ceased agreeing on who belongs to the family, or on what the word “Jew” means. Ultra-Orthodox Jews increasingly question the Jewishness of those outside their own intensely religious communities. The flood of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel deepened their doubts. In the Soviet Union, when someone with parents of two nationalities received identity papers at age 16, he could pick which nationality to list. A child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could put down “Jew.” The religious principle of matrilineal descent was irrelevant.
In the United States, the Reform movement responded to rising intermarriage by deciding in 1983 to accept children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother as Jews if they were raised within the faith. The denominations also diverge on how to accept a convert into Judaism. Orthodox Jews generally do not regard conversions by non-Orthodox rabbis as valid — either because the rabbis do not strictly follow religious law or because they do not require the converts to do so. The number of people in America “recognized by some movements as Jewish but not by others” is “certainly in six figures,” according to Jonathan D. Sarna, a Brandeis University professor and the author of “American Judaism: A History.”
Denominational rules are only part of the story. In much of the world, Jewish identity has become fluid, part ethnicity, part religion, a matter of choice. “In the United States and also in Western Europe there are many kinds of Jews,” Prof. Menachem Friedman, a Bar-Ilan University sociologist of religion, told me. “People can change religions and identities quickly.” But in Israel, belonging has practical consequences: The 1950 Law of Return grants every Jew the right to immigration. In 1970, the Knesset defined the term “Jew” as meaning “one who was born to a Jewish mother or who converted to Judaism.” That was a partial victory for those demanding traditional religious criteria. But to keep the door open to those who didn’t fit that definition, the amendment also granted the right of immigration to the child, grandchild or spouse of a Jew. Each time religious parties sought to go further and define conversion by Orthodox rules, Sarna recounts, “American Jewry would go into crisis mode,” its leaders insisting that Israel couldn’t delegitimize the non-Orthodox denominations.
In 1986, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Interior Ministry’s Population Registry to list Shoshana Miller, a Reform convert from America, as Jewish on her ID card. The ultra-Orthodox interior minister resigned in protest. In practice, though, the rabbinate paid scant attention to ID cards. Couples registering to marry were asked to bring two witnesses who could testify that the applicants were Jews under Orthodox law. The two arms of the state, secular and religious, operated according to separate rules.
And in the rabbinate, power was shifting to the ultra-Orthodox — the wing of Judaism that segregates itself from the surrounding society and culture. In the early years of the state, those serving in the rabbinate generally identified with the project of building a Jewish state and felt a connection with secular Jews. Politics changed that. Thirty years ago, ultra-Orthodox parties held 5 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Today, they hold 18. Secular politicians need their support to build a stable coalition government. One way to gain it is to back ultra-Orthodox candidates for rabbinic posts. It is one of the stranger alliances that politics can create: the secular politicians regard “Jewish” mainly as a nationality, an ethnic identity that includes both believers and nonbelievers. For the rabbis they have empowered, “Jewish” is exclusively a religious category, and secular Jews are at best estranged cousins.
The true Era of Mistrust began in the 1990s, with the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. A semiclandestine agency called Nativ (Route) was responsible for checking whether would-be immigrants qualified under the Law of Return. To establish Jewish identity, the agency scrutinized Soviet documents.
At the state rabbinate, marriage registrars adopted their own policy of doubt. Increasingly, rabbinate clerks sent anyone not born in Israel, or whose parents weren’t married in Israel, to a rabbinic court to prove that he or she was Jewish. Rabbi Osher Ehrentreu, the official at the rabbinic courts responsible for checking Jewish status, can’t name a date for the change, which apparently emerged without an explicit decision. The courts sought the same kind of documents as Nativ did, like birth certificates of the applicant’s mother and maternal grandmother listing them as Jews.
The traditional willingness to trust a person who said he was Jewish, Ehrentreu asserts, presumed that no one had anything to gain by it. Today, he told me, there are ulterior motives — to be able to leave another country and come to Israel, “to be recognized here as Jewish, to be able to get married.” That is, Israel’s prosperity, its attractiveness to immigrants, is now a reason for doubt.
Friedman, the reigning academic expert on ultra-Orthodox society in Israel, suggests that the deeper reasons for doubt are difficult for the rabbis to articulate. In contrast to Orthodox Jews like Farber, the ultra-Orthodox have little sense of risk that by raising doubts they might exclude a person who is really Jewish. “If you don’t keep the Torah and the commandments, O.K., so I excluded you. In any case you weren’t a complete Jew,” is how Friedman explains the attitude.
The policy of suspicion is applied to all immigrants. Rabbi Rasson Arussi, chairman of the Chief Rabbinate’s committee on marriage, told me that “populations where there is doubt about Jewishness” include those from Western countries, specifically “the sectors connected to Reform Jews.” The rabbinate’s expectations, however, are a poor fit with the United States. American Jews generally don’t have government papers testifying to their Jewishness. While a British Jew might turn to his country’s chief rabbinate for certification that he is Jewish, the very idea of a chief rabbi sounds outlandish in the United States.
And as Farber points out, the reign of doubt at the Israeli rabbinate began as it was becoming steadily less likely that an American Jew would be able to dig an Orthodox marriage contract out of her mother’s drawer. In the generation after World War II, most American Jews moved away from even a nominal connection to Orthodoxy. Today, young American-born Jews are likely to be two or three generations removed from any tie with Orthodoxy.
Strikingly, the rabbinate’s doubts extend even to Orthodox rabbis in America. “They’re not familiar with them,” Friedman told me. “They say: ‘The rabbis in the United States, in England, aren’t the kind we know. Someone can define himself as an Orthodox rabbi, but really he’s Reform.’ ” A marriage registrar given a letter from an Orthodox rabbi abroad certifying that a person is Jewish is now expected to check with the office of Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, which maintains a list of diaspora clergy whose letters are to be trusted. The list is not publicly available. If the rabbi who wrote the letter is not on the list, the applicant is asked for other proof or referred to the rabbinic courts.
Converts, even the children of converts, potentially face greater difficulties, because the rabbinate has also become more skeptical about Orthodox conversions performed abroad. What’s more, under pressure from Chief Rabbi Amar, the main association of Orthodox clergy in the United States, the Rabbinical Council of America, is establishing its own regional rabbinic courts for conversion. A recent council position paper warns that the group makes no commitment to stand behind conversions performed by other rabbis. The paper also stresses that converts are expected to accept Orthodox religious law, or Halakhah.
The policy has divided the American group. Advocates say that standardization will ensure that converts are accepted by all religious Jews. A former council president, Marc Angel, a sharp critic, told me the group “decided to capitulate” to Amar and robbed individual rabbis of their prerogative to measure the needs and commitment of prospective converts. “The rabbinate in Israel has put the Orthodox rabbinate” — meaning Orthodox rabbis in the United States — “on the same level as Reform rabbis,” Angel said. He now advocates a position once unthinkable among R.C.A. rabbis: Israel would be better off if it instituted civil marriage and cut the state’s ties with the rabbinate.
Not surprisingly, leaders of non-Orthodox denominations in the United States sound both pained and vindicated when discussing the rabbinate’s policies. “There is quite an irony in this,” Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told me. In the past, “Orthodox authorities in America have basically defended the system, and they’ve embraced this religious monopoly as being important and necessary, thinking all the while that it was directed primarily against us, us meaning the non-Orthodox community.” Now their own bona fides are in doubt.
Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of the American Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, stresses the damage to Israel-diaspora relations: “All the data shows a growing rift between American Jews and Israeli Jews, and the younger you are as an American Jew, the less that you care about the state of Israel. This is just terrible. And one of the reasons for it — not the only reason, but one of the reasons for it — is this kind of insulting treatment of the majority of American Jews by the Israeli rabbinate.”
Seth Farber, a pragmatic idealist, does not expect either the rabbinate or the basic disagreements about who is Jewish to disappear. What he rather desperately believes, he said, is that “a conversation has to begin” on how Orthodox Jews — including the rabbinate — and non-Orthodox Jews can agree “to trust each other” despite the disputes. The Israeli rabbinate, that is, should trust a Reform rabbi’s testimony that a person’s mother is Jewish. For Farber, there is a price to overwhelming doubt: It means “writing thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, out of the Jewish world.”
With no grand compromise in the offing, Farber works on individual cases. Over the last five years, he said, he helped more than 100 people prove to the rabbinate that they were Jewish. The amount of detective work he undertakes demonstrates his own dedication. But it also shows how difficult it can be for people from typical American Jewish backgrounds to provide evidence of an identity they regard as self-evident.
Mark Rashkow, whose wedding was saved by Farber’s intervention, described him as “relentless.” Rashkow came to Israel from Chicago in 2003 to woo the woman he loved as a young volunteer 30 years before at Kibbutz Hazorea. Both he and she were at the end of long marriages. A year later, just days before their wedding, the local rabbinate informed him that he had yet to show he was Jewish. A rabbinate official in the town of Afula, near Hazorea, dismissed a letter from his Conservative rabbi in America, saying, according to Rashkow: “It doesn’t interest me. He’s a goy.”
Growing up in Chicago, Rashkow said, “I thought my first name was ‘kike’ until I was 12.” But when he found Farber via an Internet search just a few days before his planned wedding, the only leads Rashkow could provide him with were his maternal grandmother’s name and her approximate year of death. “Seth Farber, to me, was like an angel sent from heaven,” said Rashkow, who told his story at an exuberant pace. Farber began phoning Jewish cemeteries, working late into the Israeli night to reach Chicago in daytime. On the fourth or fifth call, he succeeded: the voice at the other end had the name listed in a section of the graveyard belonging to a society of Jews who’d come from Sokolow, in Poland. A cemetery employee sent pictures by e-mail of the gravestone, which was replete with Hebrew.
The next step was finding a birth certificate for Rashkow that showed his mother’s name, and one for his mother that listed her mother — thereby establishing his link to the gravestone. A lawyer whom Rashkow knew in Chicago rushed to the courthouse to get the papers. Farber then contacted the Chicago Rabbinical Council, an Orthodox body recognized by the Israeli rabbinate, to certify Rashkow as Jewish. The faxed letter arrived a day before the wedding, and Rashkow was able to marry the woman he had dreamed of for 30 years.
Suzie, Sharon’s mother, called Farber on a Sunday morning, the start of the Israeli workweek. He asked her for her grandmother’s maiden name, which she didn’t recall, and told her to ask someone in Minnesota to find her maternal grandparents’ tombstones.
“The hunt is on,” he wrote me in an e-mail message that night. He contacted the Chicago Rabbinical Council, which provided the names of the rabbi of an Orthodox synagogue in Minneapolis and his predecessor. Farber called both. Neither knew Suzie’s family, and the synagogue had no record of her grandmother. An old friend of Suzie’s in Minneapolis went to the courthouse and got a copy of her parents’ marriage license, signed by a rabbi. Farber did a Google search for his name and found that he had been a leading figure in the Conservative movement — meaning the license was at best weak supporting evidence before an Israeli rabbinic court. Once again, the link to an Orthodox community was missing.
Farber went to the Web site of Ellis Island and ran searches for Suzie’s family members in the repository of records of the “teeming masses” that arrived there. The manifests of arriving ships list “race or people” of immigrants, and “Hebrew” — meaning Jew — is one designation. But he was unable to locate any record of Suzie’s grandmother. “I’m a little less confident than I was,” he told me on the third day of his hunt.
Online, he found the Portage County Historical Society of Wisconsin. He sent the group an e-mail message about Suzie’s mother, born as Belle Mersky in 1907, asking “if, by any chance, there might be synagogue records of her birth available to you.” It was a geographical near miss; Wausau is in neighboring Marathon County. His message was forwarded to Rabbi Dan Danson of Wausau’s sole synagogue, a Reform congregation. But it had no archives of births from before 1988. Another dead end.
By now, though, Farber had phoned the Marathon County Register of Deeds, seeking Suzie’s mother’s birth certificate. The request, he was told, had to come from an immediate relative. Fortunately, Danson offered to help, and Suzie sent him the necessary information by e-mail. By Friday morning — five days after Suzie first called Farber — Danson was at the Wausau courthouse with the papers and $20 of his own money. Belle Mersky’s birth certificate, faxed to Farber’s home, showed that her mother’s maiden name was Rose Reuben.
Suzie’s niece visited the Jewish cemetery in Minneapolis where her grandparents were buried. The tombstones, originally placed flush with the ground, were now covered with grass and sod. She went home, returned with a shovel, and uncovered the evidence. In the photo of the gravestone that she sent by e-mail, above the name Rose Mersky in English was Hebrew: “Rachel, daughter of Moshe,” with the date of death, the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul, in the year 5714 (1954).
A week into the search, evidence was coming together. In a school project her son once did, Suzie found a family photo of her grandmother’s grandfather, Mikhael Ludmersky, an archetypal 19th-century Eastern European Jew with a white beard and black cap. From her family’s Conservative congregation in Minneapolis she received yahrzeit cards for her grandparents — records used to remind relatives of the anniversaries of their loved ones’ deaths, when the kaddish prayer should be recited. Even given the source, it was supporting evidence.
Farber arrived at the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court about two weeks after Sharon’s first visit. He’d called and arranged with a judge to be squeezed in before the day’s docket of divorces. He had power of attorney, so Sharon didn’t need to appear. He wore a black suit and a gold tie, and his face was narrow and taut. “Now I’ve moved up from detective to lawyer,” he said. He was ushered into a tiny courtroom, where three rabbis, dressed in the black coats of the ultra-Orthodox, sat at a raised bench. Farber approached and made his case to one. He showed the series of birth certificates of Sharon’s maternal line, with the surnames Goldstein, Mersky, Reuben. “These are all clearly Jewish names,” he said. He presented the picture of the tombstone of Rachel, daughter of Moshe, and the photograph of Mikhael Ludmersky in his black cap, and the rest of his exhibits. The judge said to wait outside.
Twenty minutes later, a clerk called Farber in and presented him with a one-sentence judgment stating that Sharon is a Jew.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.” His last article for the magazine was about the construction of Israel’s security barrier through the West Bank.

The Path Of the Just: Is Mussar the ‘New Kabbalah’?

2008-03-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

By Jay Michaelson
Thu. Feb 28, 2008

Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar
By Alan Morinis
Trumpeter, 335 pages, $24.95
A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar
By Ira Stone
Aviv Press, 320 pages, $17.95.
How do you become a better person? A simple question, it would seem, but there are no easy answers — and no agreement as to which of the many paths toward self-improvement is most efficacious. In general, the mainstream Jewish path has been one of heteronomy: conforming one’s behavior to externally defined norms. Other systems, such as the teachings of Jesus and those of the Buddha, focus more on internally purifying the heart than on externally governing particular behaviors — some with an emphasis on self-love and affirmation, others on self-critique and self-abnegation. Well, the jury is still out.
Mussar, the moralistic movement within Eastern European Judaism that had its zenith at the turn of the last century, tends more toward the latter strains. It recognizes that, as Nachmanides (and Jesus) said, one can obey all the laws and still be a scoundrel (naval bi-rishut ha-Torah), and so it focuses instead on rectifying the middot, or character traits, from within. The general contours of Mussar practice are straightforward: introspection and self-accounting (cheshbon ha’nefesh) to determine where one is falling short, and a variety of techniques to improve one’s behavior, ranging from the mundane (such as repeating maxims of good behavior) to the bizarre (such as inviting ridicule in order to cultivate humility).
Perhaps surprisingly, Mussar, which in its extreme forms can involve asceticism, piety and self-abnegation — not to mention hyper-scrupulous observance of the commandments — has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, prompting some to label it the “new Kabbalah,” i.e., the latest Jewish spiritual trend. Two recent books by two founders of new schools of Mussar illustrate the appeal, but perhaps also the shortcomings, of this old-new wisdom.
Alan Morinis’s “Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar” is a readable, engaging, friendly book — quite at odds with Mussar’s reputation for piety and, well, sourness. Morinis came late to Jewish observance and spiritual practice; his last book, “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” told his story of evolution from Rhodes scholar and Hollywood mogul to Mussar-practicing yid. While many such baalei teshuvah are overzealous in their observance and fundamentalist in their zeal, Morinis has maintained an even keel; he writes as one besotted with the Jewish path, but not so intoxicated as to forget the conventions of the secular. He’s an accessible guide, and a sober one.
“Everyday Holiness” is clearly written for the layperson, and much of the book has a familiarity to it that, to this reader at least, diminished the novelty (some would say weirdness) of Mussar practice. For example, more than half the book is devoted to enumerating 18 virtues on which one might focus one’s attention — an appendix to the book lists over 50 more — with the sorts of anecdotes and exhortations one regularly finds in self-help literature. Morinis is a better writer than most, and he avoids the clichés and tautologies that make much self-improvement literature insufferably obvious. But there’s little new here; don’t we all know that it is good to be generous, patient and kind?
Where “Everyday Holiness” excels is where it explores how Mussar is different from, rather than similar to, what we already know. Here, Morinis is again an affable guide, prescribing daily, weekly and yearly practices to translate the generalities of ethics into the particularities of daily life. For instance, he advocates selecting 13 midot and focusing on each for one week at a time — four cycles of the 13 each year. For each week, Morinis exhorts the reader to awaken with meditation or study on the attribute in question, spend the day increasing one’s sensitivity to it — both practices remarkably similar to Vipassana, or Buddhist insight meditation — and then end each day with a written cheshbon ha’nefesh that evaluates one’s progress.
I’ve not tried this practice at any serious length, and so cannot comment on its efficacy. Certainly, it seems valuable to focus one’s moral attention on a limited set of qualities, not least because it renders the vast task of self-improvement more manageable and defined — next week, I’ll worry about humility; this week, I’m focused on trust. It’s also doubtless true that any structured attention to one’s ethical habits is likely to improve one’s behavior.
Yet it’s hard to see Mussar becoming “the new Kabbalah.” For starters, it may be not spiritual enough for spiritual aficionados: It doesn’t bring about altered consciousness, doesn’t involve any esoteric wisdom and has few bells and whistles. It’s not even very Jewish; as Morinis notes, even its advocates had to sandwich Mussar practice in between the more normative activities of Torah study, prayer and observance of the commandments, and there is little distinctively Jewish about these ethics, as there is, say, about Kabbalah.
On the other hand, Mussar may be too spiritual for secularists: Given that Morinis focuses on secular values to the exclusion of religious ones (many Mussar texts are at least as concerned with scrupulous ritual observance as they are with ethics, but Morinis leaves those out), one wonders why Mussar is superior to secular forms of self-improvement, which come less freighted with tradition. If pure ethics is the goal, why bother with religious forms at all?
Of course, all this assumes that there is some zone of the “spiritual” distinct from ethics — which is precisely what Mussar aims to deny. For Mussar, spirituality is most centrally expressed in ethical action, in the “everyday holiness” we are able to cultivate in our exchanges with other people. It’s a noble belief; I just wonder who the audience is.
Ira Stone’s “A Responsible Life” is an almost perfect complement to Morinis’s book. Stone is literary where Morinis is accessible, biographical where Morinis is practical. And most noticeably, Stone is communal where Morinis is individual. In Morinis’s book, Mussar practice is essentially solitary — focused on diarizing, meditation, introspection. Drawing on different sources from Morinis, Stone advocates working with partners and groups who act as witnesses (and sometimes judges) of one’s behavior, creating an almost mystical fellowship of ethical rectitude. Stone leads such a fellowship in Philadelphia, where he is also a congregational rabbi. For him, the community is all.
What the Mussar circle does, in Stone’s depiction of it, is keep us honest; with witnesses, everything is out in the open. But while this can have a “feet to the fire” quality, it is actually not so different from the contemporary practice of “co-counseling,” in which laypeople counsel one another, offering not analysis or advice but simply a listening presence. There are no experts, no leaders — as soon as one partner is finished speaking, the roles switch and the listener becomes the talker. The effects can be quite powerful — and empowering, as the work is accomplished without therapists, fees and professional offices.
Frustratingly, Stone’s book gives precious little direct advice beyond “find yourself a partner and a community” to those wishing to take on Mussar as a personal practice. Perhaps this is because the particulars, as Morinis also notes, will of necessity be different for each person (I may need to work primarily on anger, someone else on laziness or deception). Or perhaps it is because Stone is more interested in describing what Mussar is (his book has more material on the history and key figures of the movement), while Morinis focuses on “how it can work for you.” Whatever the reason, one can finish “A Responsible Life” without knowing exactly what to do next.
The great gift of Mussar lies less in its enumeration of the virtues than it its distinctive technologies of cultivating them. Perhaps not all of us, but certainly most of us by a certain age, know the traits to which we ought to aspire. The question is how to do it, how to translate whatever our values are into the lives that we actually live.
To this question, Mussar provides a clear answer: Look closely at yourself, and set yourself a discipline of watchful self-accounting, as rigorous and serious as your diet, your work schedule or your regimen of physical exercise. Take ethics at least as seriously as you take Pilates.
Surely this is a salutary message for our times. Yet if we 21st-century Americans tilt too far in the direction of moral laziness, many of us also tip too far in the other direction: toward too much self-criticism, self-judgment, even self-hatred. Aware of the tendency for Mussar practice to turn to unhelpful self-abnegation — beating one’s heart just a bit too hard on Yom Kippur — both Morinis and Stone are careful to praise moderation and condemn self-loathing.
But for this reader, the larger question is still open. Enumerating virtues, measuring behavior and recording where one falls short seem, by all accounts, to work. Yet what if we were to believe that improving the self came not from measuring and accounting, but from loving, from cultivating joy, loving-kindness and generosity in an open and loving heart? It’s a myth that self-love leads to narcissism; overindulgence comes from loving oneself too little, not too much. Real spiritual work inexorably leads to ethical action, as in the supposedly world-disregarding Buddhist monks who at the time of this writing are leading a mass, nonviolent protest movement in Myanmar. Might it not be better to love, first and foremost, and leave the counting behind?

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds

2008-02-25T15:13:00.000-05:00

February 25, 2008
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.
For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.
The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”
Detailing the nature of religious affiliation — who has the numbers, the education, the money — signals who could hold sway over the country’s political and cultural life, said John Green, an author of the report who is a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.
Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, echoed that view. “Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors,” said Mr. Lindsay, who had read the Pew report. “It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”
In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that from 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.
In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.
The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.
While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.
To Prof. Stephen Prothero, large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity point to the same desires.
“The trend is toward more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” said Mr. Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, who explained that evangelical churches tailor many of their activities for youth. “Those losing out are offering impersonal religion and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”
The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.
The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”
Immigration continues to influence American religion greatly, the survey found. The majority of immigrants are Christian, and almost half are Catholic. Muslims rival Mormons for having the largest families. And Hindus are the best-educated and among the richest religious groups, the survey found.
“I think politicians will be looking at this survey to see what groups they ought to target,” Professor Prothero said. “If the Hindu population is negligible, they won’t have to worry about it. But if it is wealthy, then they may have to pay attention.”
Experts said the wide-ranging variety of religious affiliation could set the stage for further conflicts over morality or politics, or new alliances on certain issues, as religious people have done on climate change or Jews and Hindus have done over relations between the United States, Israel and India.
“It sets up the potential for big arguments,” Mr. Green said, “but also for the possibility of all sorts of creative synthesis. Diversity cuts both ways.”

Praying for Christian Unity, When Diversity Has Been the Answer

2008-01-23T14:59:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times:

January 19, 2008
Beliefs
By PETER STEINFELS

Has the movement for unity among Christians gone into a coma?
The annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began Friday, a century after the first such celebration. In many countries, Christians deeply devoted to unity among their separate groups will gather in one anothers’ churches to pray and reflect on passages from Scripture. Since 1968, prayers and readings for the week have been jointly planned by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches.
But for most Christians, the week, centennial or not, carries no more resonance than, say, National Secretaries Week (now officially Administrative Professionals Week).
Has the ecumenical movement lost steam? Or has it, perhaps, fallen victim to its own success? One way or the other, does it make any difference?
In 1908, it certainly did to the Rev. Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White, an Episcopal priest and nun, founders, in Garrison, N.Y., of a small Anglican religious community in the Franciscan tradition. They initiated eight days of prayer between what were then feast days associated with Saints Peter and Paul.
These two leaders and their Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement soon became Roman Catholics, so the week of prayer naturally had little appeal to Protestants. Still, all sorts of other streams fed into the cause of joining in prayer for Christian unity: the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, often described as the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement, and efforts by the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A.
Christian unity was, of course, a chief goal of the Second Vatican Council, when the world’s Catholic bishops invited Protestant and Orthodox leaders, now known as “separated brethren” rather than “heretics” and “schismatics,” to observe and consult during the council’s four sessions from 1962 to 1965.
That work has been carried on by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox ecumenical officers and theologians engaged in interchurch dialogue. These highly committed people track the progress of unity the way brokers watch the stock ticker.
But people in the pews appear to have other things on their mind. They take for granted the lowering of what were once painful barriers dividing spouses and family members and even citizens. In the question period after John F. Kennedy’s oft-cited presidential campaign speech on church and state to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, several ministers worried out loud that a Catholic president could not fulfill the ceremonial responsibilities of the office because the church normally barred Catholics from attending non-Catholic worship services.
For those ministers, it was unthinkable that a president and two former presidents might be photographed, as they were in 2004, attending the funeral of a pope. Today, for younger Americans, it is unthinkable that anyone might have once considered such a sight unthinkable.
So the success of the movement for church unity has itself removed much of the urgency behind it. There are three other reasons, however, why the cause has cooled, and they reveal much about the religious landscape generally.
First, in the eyes of many, thanks to the understanding and fellowship generated by dialogue, what was once the scandal of division now looks more like the virtue of diversity. The diversity of Christian traditions has kept neglected facets of the faith alive and emphasized in some quarters — to be recovered when their absence was felt.
Sociologists of religion have argued that Christianity has flourished, in fact, where a diversity of church forms and practices have met the needs of different social groups.
Second, the relationship between Christianity and other world religions — Islam, in particular — has supplanted Christian unity as a pressing concern. To the extent that religion currently abets violence, it is hardly in conflicts over papal authority or whether worshipers sharing in the Lord’s Supper should partake of both bread and wine.
Today, the greatest need for dialogue, building relationships and learning what really animates another believer seems to lie in yawning and dangerous differences between Christianity and other religions, rather than among the different Christian churches, denominations and sects.
Third, the looming question for many Christian churches and denominations is no longer whether doctrinal boundaries are too absolute and exclusive but whether these groups can define and maintain any clear-cut identity at all.
Years ago, a study of the drift of Presbyterian baby boomers away from their religious roots highlighted the difficulty parents and leaders of the denomination had in answering a simple question: “Why be a Presbyterian?” One Presbyterian journalist rather unfairly cracked that the question might have been posed as “What is a Presbyterian?”
This anxiety about identity is most evident in a stream of conservative positions taken by Pope Benedict XVI, his predecessor John Paul II, and their Vatican offices. It has been easier to question the wisdom of these measures than to argue that the anxiety behind them is unwarranted.
The battle over whether this or that Christian group’s boundaries are unjustifiably exclusive has not gone away: it is currently being fought around the issue of homosexuality. Yet this battle, too, is being fought within, not between, different Christian churches and denominations, again confirming the priority that identity has taken over unity.
Those joining in prayers for Christian unity during the next week will be well aware of the insight, imagination and empathy that the ecumenical movement has fostered; for the near future, however, these gifts are likely to be directed primarily to other challenges.

Article in the Courier-Journal by IPP's Board President on "Civility"

2008-01-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

Friends,

Here is a wonderful article by our Board President. It appeared in Sunday's Courier-Journal. Congratulations Don!

On Civility: Where does it come from and where did it go?

By Donald H. Vish
Special to The Courier-Journal

This article first appeared in the December 2007 issue of Louisville Bar Briefs, a publication of the Louisville Bar Association. It was adapted from a speech Mr. Vish, an attorney with Middleton Reutlinger, delivered in October 2007 to a young lawyers leadership conference.
Michel de Montaigne wrote: "The tie that holds me by the law of courtesy seems to me much tighter and stronger than the law of legal compulsion."
In this article, I shall observe civility's first rule: be brief.
There is a longer version of the rule. That is, think much, speak little, and write less. I was tempted to give you the maxim in its original tongue, Italian, (pensa molto, parla poco, e scrivi meno) but that would violate Washington's 72nd Rule of Civility:
"Speak not in an unknown tongue in company, but in your own language …"
Where does civility come from
The Greeks thought civility came from civic necessity. Without civility, the state could not function. Uncivil conduct, according to etymology, is conduct of someone who is not a citizen -- a barbarian.
Lord Chesterfield, in his famous letters to his son, thought civility -- good manners, courtesy and polish -- were a stratagem, a way to get ahead and prevail against competitors. Of Lord Chesterfield's letters, Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote: "[T]hey teach the manners of a dance-master and the morals of a prostitute."
Plato's approach to the need for civility is encompassed in his empathetic dictum: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
The grand Hindu pronouncement, "Thou art that" (pronounced tat twam asi), provides another basis for treating civility as an exercise in self-interest. That is, we do good things for our neighbor because our neighbor is identical to our self. Western interpretation of the great pronouncement treats it as the ultimate basis for ethical conduct. Since we are all one in the Hindu conception of the world, civility benefits the giver and the receiver -- the proverbial win-win formulation at the intersection of compassion and self-interest.
Contemporary thinkers since the Enlightenment regard ethics, not self-improvement, as the fountainhead of civility, since civility is concerned with the well-being of others and requires the actor to give consideration outside self.
George Washington and Ben Franklin each had a life long interest in civility. Dr. P.M. Forni, a professor at John Hopkins University, teaches civility and Italian literature, and is the co-founder of The Johns Hopkins Civility Project. His book, Choosing Civility: the 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct, present considerably fewer than George Washington's "110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation," written when he was 14 years old. My writing is indebted to Dr. Forni's work and the writing and thinking of Washington and Franklin.
What is civility?
Dr. Forni says: "Being civil means being constantly aware of others and weaving restraint, respect, and consideration into the very fabric of this awareness. Civility is a form of goodness."
While civil conduct may be described as courteous, well-mannered and polite, those who practice the art of civility are first and foremost good citizens, good neighbors practicing the art of goodness. To be sure, personal benefits redound to those who practice civility but the ultimate beneficiary is society at large.
Dr. Forni says civility leads to personal serenity and contentment and he links the study of manners and civility in a poignant way. Those who study civility, he says, [soon] begin to understand that a humble book of etiquette can be used as a primer in moral philosophy. His thoughts are similar to Ben Franklin's. Franklin thought that practicing the art of virtue would lead to: (1) personal happiness and (2) greatness.
The study and practice of civility belongs to the realm of ethics and morality. Why? Civility is not merely a way of acting but a way of living based on respect for others. To be civil means to transcend self and behave in a way that takes into account the feelings and comfort of others. Washington's 1st Rule of Civility (out of 110) might serve as the only rule of civility: Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is an entire treatise on civility.
Perhaps I should stop here: Think much, speak little and write less, as it were. Everything else that may be said about civility is simply a concrete application of the basic rule: think of others. Sometimes, however, application of the basic rule is not obvious, thus the need for codes, tutorials, rules, maxims and the continuation of this article.
The rules
Montaigne condemns idle civilities. As an example he cites the complex rules associated with the order of precedence and arrival at a conference of princes. In the custom of the times, the greatest arrived first because this arrangement testifies that the inferiors go to find the greatest, and seek him, not he them. While the art of social tact is a useful art like grace and beauty and conciliates our way with others, Montaigne warns of rote or slavish application of rules stating that he has often seen men uncivil through over-civility and importunate out of courtesy.
But rules are necessary since various aspects of civility do not come naturally. For example, one 19th Century book of etiquette advises the reader that all personal questions are rude. If you are like me, you may have thought of personal questions as a friendly way to break the ice, to show interest in others and establish rapport. But the personal question intrudes and presents a risk of placing the deponent in an awkward position (Q. How's the job going? A. I was fired last week).
The author persuaded me to avoid all personal questions and instead use a positive formulation of good wishes thereby giving the other person the option of providing a simple acknowledgment with little or no information in response.
Ben Franklin writes of his life-long attempt to cultivate diplomatic speech -- which did not come naturally to him -- and his life long practice of ignoring provocations by refusing to respond directly to personal attacks and rarely even acknowledging them -- which did not come naturally to him either.
Franklin's restraint served him well. It was not motivated by his admiration for the dictum of the Prince of Peace, turn the other cheek, but by what is useful in social intercourse. By refusing to acknowledge or respond to insult and invective, he avoided spreading the calumny further and deprived the enemy of knowing how the missile had damaged the target or even if it had hit the mark.
Franklin practiced another interesting method of enhancing social interaction: He conceded points even when he was right! Sometimes to preserve a friendship, sometimes out of respect and sometimes because the point was simply not important, the game was not worth the candle, or, as Montaigne writes: "Sometimes it is better for a man to lose his vineyard than to go to the law to keep it."
Ben Franklin also courted his opponents and adversaries, even those who he vanquished. He tells the instructive story of one adversary, a gentleman of fortune, education and talent, who spoke against Franklin's reelection to the office of clerk of the General Assembly. Let Franklin speak for himself about his course of action after winning the election:
"I did not, however, aim at gaining his favor by paying any servile respect to him but [after hearing] that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book I wrote a note to him [asking to borrow it]. He sent it… I returned it … with another note [thanking him]. When next we met in the House he spoke to me (which he had never done before) with great civility…so that we became great friends…"
Washington's 110 rules may be summarized by the first: "respect those present." Dr. Forni's 25 rules of civility are few enough to list separately:
pay attention
acknowledge others
think the best
listen, be inclusive
speak kindly
don't speak ill
accept and give praise
respect "No"
respect others' opinion
mind your bod,
be agreeable
keep it down and rediscover silence
respect other people's time and space
apologize earnestly
assert yourself
avoid personal questions
care for your guests
think twice before asking for a favor
refrain from idle complaints
accept and give constructive criticism
respect the environment
be gentle to animals
don't shift blame.
Of the twenty five rules, Dr. Forni cites one as being at the heart of all civil behavior: speak kindly. That is Plato's advice. An entire treatise may be devoted to the subject of ill-tempered speech. Indeed, a substantial portion of the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible are devoted to the maxim, control your tongue. And to that there might be added your pen, your email, your car, your cell-phone, your blog and your camera-phone.
Has civility declined?
I was asked to write on the topic of civility because of the widespread belief that civility is in decline. You hear the stories portraying a long-lost golden age of decorum and grace. But there is an alternate history. Take, for example, the example of Kentucky lawyer and Jefferson County legislator William Jordan Graves (1805-1848). He fought a duel with deadly weapons -- rifles -- in 1838, while a member of the House of Representatives, and killed Jonathan Cilley, a representative from Maine.
And listen to the verbal invective of 19th Century Virginia Sen. John Randolph directed to a fellow senator. Randolph said,
"[He is] so brilliant, yet so corrupt, and like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, which shines and stinks."
And how did Henry Clay react to the insult? According to the custom of the day, he challenged Randolph to a duel.
Surely you recall your first act in becoming a lawyer: an oath that you had not fought a duel with deadly weapons nor served as a second nor carried a challenge. The golden age of decorum was not always as we like to remember it.
Actually, concern for civility has been present throughout the history of civilization. And while the rules and customs change (smoking in public provides a current example, eye contact is respectful in some cultures, disrespectful in others), the reasons for incivility remain constant: failure to consider the needs and comfort of others.
Whether the omission is based on anger, carelessness or lack of knowledge, the result is the same. We put ourselves first.
Dr. Forni identifies several current cultural conditions that make incivility more widespread if not more pronounced, even though there are some areas of our culture where there is more civility today: a culture of narcissism (I did it my way), the Age of Self, the decline of authority, mistrust of forms over substance, anonymity, the drive to succeed (we are too busy, too goal directed), stress, winning.
To his list, I would add: The Plague. That is to say, incivility is contagious. One uncivil act begets another which treads on the heels of another and spreads like ripples on water.
So are there antidotes to the Plague? Well, if there are not enough Rules already, I would add four:
Think much, speak little, and write less.
Save your anger for the right occasion but always withhold it in two cases: 1) where you can't change the outcome; and 2) where you can.
Look and overlook, bear and forbear.
Always make haste slowly.

Terry

from the NY Times: The Evangelical Crackup

2007-10-28T10:48:00.000-04:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 28, 2007
The Evangelical Crackup
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.

For years, Fox flaunted his allegiance to the Republican Party, urging fellow pastors to make the same “confession” and calling them “sissies” if they didn’t. “We are the religious right,” he liked to say. “One, we are religious. Two, we are right.”

His congregation, for the most part, applauded. Immanuel and Wichita’s other big churches were seedbeds of the conservative Christian activism that burst forth three decades ago. In the 1980s, when theological conservatives pushed the moderates out of the Southern Baptist Convention, Immanuel and Fox were both at the forefront. In 1991, when Operation Rescue brought its “Summer of Mercy” abortion protests to Wichita, Immanuel’s parishioners leapt to the barricades, helping to establish the city as the informal capital of the anti-abortion movement. And Fox’s confrontational style packed ever more like-minded believers into the pews. He more than doubled Immanuel’s official membership to more than 6,000 and planted the giant cross on its roof.

So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that he was quitting so he could work full time on “cultural issues.” Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. “It just wasn’t pertinent,” Associate Pastor Gayle Tenbrook later told me.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western hotel. “I don’t mind telling you that I paid a price for the political stands I took,” Fox said. “The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.”

Fox is not the only conservative Christian to feel the heat of those battles, even in — of all places — Wichita. Within three months of his departure, the two other most influential conservative Christian pastors in the city had left their pulpits as well. And in the silence left by their voices, a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party — some as likely to lean left as right — is beginning to speak up.

Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.

The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene. Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65, the indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority and much of the rest of the movement, is confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs because of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71 and still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at Focus on the Family; it is expected to tack toward the less political family advice that is its bread and butter.

The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that morning.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

The generational and theological shifts in the evangelical world are turning the next election into a credibility test for the conservative Christian establishment. The current Republican front-runner in national polls, Rudolph W. Giuliani, could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights. Alarmed at the continued strength of his candidacy, Dobson and a group of about 50 evangelical Christians leaders agreed last month to back a third party if Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee. But polls show that Giuliani is the most popular candidate among white evangelical voters. He has the support, so far, of a plurality if not a majority of conservative Christians. If Giuliani captures the nomination despite the threat of an evangelical revolt, it will be a long time before Republican strategists pay attention to the demands of conservative Christian leaders again. And if the Democrats capitalize on the current demoralization to capture a larger share of evangelical votes, the credibility damage could be just as severe.

“There was a time when evangelical churches were becoming largely and almost exclusively the Republican Party at prayer,” said Marvin Olasky, the editor of the evangelical magazine World and an informal adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor. “To some extent — we have to see how much — the Republicans have blown it. That opportunity to lock up that constituency has vanished. The ball now really is in the Democrats’ court.”

I covered the Christian conservative movement for The New York Times during the 2004 election, at the moment of its greatest triumph. To the bewilderment of many even in the upper reaches of his own party, Karl Rove bet President Bush’s re-election on boosting the conservative Christian turnout, contending that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because four million of those voters stayed home. President Bush missed few opportunities to remind evangelicals that he was one of them — and they got the message.

I bowed my head in a good number of swing-state churches in 2004. I saw the passion Bush aroused among theologically orthodox Protestants. And I got to know many of the most influential conservative Christian leaders, most of whom threw themselves into urging their constituents to the polls.

Now, as the 2008 campaign heated up in the months before the first primaries, I wondered how the world was looking from the pulpits and pews. And so I went to Wichita, as close as any place to the heart of conservative Christian America. Wichita has a long history of religious crusades. A hundred years ago, Carrie Nation made her name smashing up Wichita’s bars. More recently, the presence of Dr. George Tiller, a specialist in late-term abortions, has kept anti-abortion passions high, attracting Operation Rescue to Wichita for the Summer of Mercy protests in 1991. Two years later, a lone activist shot and wounded Dr. Tiller. Evolution, the flash point that split mainline and evangelical Protestants in the early 20th century, is still hotly debated in Wichita. The Kansas school board has reversed itself on the subject again and again in recent years.

At the same time, Wichita is also a decent proxy for plenty of other blue-collar but socially conservative places like Allentown, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio — the swing districts of the swing states that decide elections. A center of aerospace manufacturing, Wichita was a union town and a Democratic stronghold for much of the last century. But all that changed when the conservative Christian movement took root in its suburban megachurches three decades ago, turning theological traditionalists into Republican activists. That story was the centerpiece of the liberal writer Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” He might have called it “What’s the Matter With Wichita?”

I arrived just in time for the annual Fourth of July Patriotic Celebration at the 7,000-member Central Christian Church, where Independence Day is second only to Christmas. Thousands of people drove back to the church Sunday evening for a pageant of prayers, songs, a flag ceremony and an American history quiz pitting kids against their parents. “In God We Still Trust” was the theme of the event. “You place your hand on this Bible when you swear to tell the truth,” two men sang in the opening anthem.

“There’s no separation; we’re one nation under Him.”

“There are those among us who want to push Him out And erase

His name from everything this country’s all about.

From the schoolhouse to the courthouse, they are silencing

His word Now it’s time for all believers to make our voices heard.”

Later, as a choir in stars-and-stripes neckties and scarves belted out “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a cluster of men in olive military fatigues took the stage carrying a flag. They lifted the pole to a 45-degree angle and froze in place around it: a re-enactment of the famous photograph of the American triumph at Iwo Jima. The narrator of a preceding video montage had already set the stage by comparing the Iwo Jima flag raising to another long-ago turning point in a “fierce battle for the hearts of men” — the day 2,000 years ago when “a heavy cross was lifted up on top of the mount called Golgotha.”

A battle flag as the crucifixion: the church rose to a standing ovation.

There was one conspicuous omission from the Patriotic Celebration: any mention of President Bush or the Iraq war. The only reference to the president was a single image in a video montage. Bush was standing with Donald Rumsfeld, head bowed at a grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Every time I visited an evangelical church in 2004, it seemed that a member’s brother or cousin had just returned from Iraq with reports that much greater progress was being made than the news media let on. The admiration for President Bush as a man of faith was nearly universal, and some talked of his contest with John Kerry as a spiritual battle. It would have been hard to overstate the Christian conservative leadership’s sense of the presidential race’s historical significance. In the days before the election, Dobson told me he believed the culture war was “rapidly approaching the climax, with everything that we are about on the line” and the election might be “the pivot point.”

The morning after the Republican triumph, a White House operative called Dobson to thank him personally for his support, as Dobson told me in conversation later that day. He bluntly told the operative that the Bush campaign owed his victory in large part to concerned Christian voters. He warned that God had given the nation only “a short reprieve” from its impending “self-destruction.” If the administration slighted its conservative Christian supporters, most importantly in filling Supreme Court vacancies, Dobson continued, Republicans would “pay a price in four years.”

On that front, at least, Bush has not disappointed. President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., have given Dobson and his allies much to be thankful for. Nor has Bush flinched from any politically feasible Christian conservative goal, even when it has been unpopular. He has blocked federal financing for embryonic stem-cell research and intervened to help keep Terri Schiavo on life support. But of course there were moments when the White House seemed to care more about Social Security reform, and in the end the culture did not change.

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

Some claim the falloff in support for Bush reflects the unrealistic expectations pumped up by conservative Christian leaders. But no one denies the war is a factor. Christianity Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.

“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”

Welsh, who favors pressed khaki pants and buttoned-up polo shirts, is a staunch conservative, a committed Republican and, personally, a politics junkie. But he told me he was wary of talking too much about politics or public affairs around the church because his congregation was so divided over the war in Iraq.

Welsh said he considered himself among those who still support the president. “I think he is a good man,” Welsh said, slowly. “He has a heart, a spiritual heart.”

But like most of the people I met at Wichita’s evangelical churches, his support for Bush sounded more than a little agonized — closer to sympathy than admiration. “Bush may not have the best people around him,” he added, delicately. “He may not have made the best decisions. He is in a quagmire right now and maybe doesn’t know how to get out. Because to pull out now would say, ‘I was wrong from the very beginning.’ ”

Some were less ambivalent. “We know we want to get rid of Bush,” Linda J. Hogle, a product demonstrator at Sam’s Club, told me when I asked her about the 2008 election at her evangelical church’s Fourth of July picnic.

“I am glad he can’t run again,” agreed her friend, Floyd Willson. Hogle and Willson both voted for President Bush in 2004. Both are furious at the war and are looking to vote for a Democrat next year. “Upwards of a thousand boys that have been needlessly killed, it is all just politics,” Willson said.

The 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — the core of the evangelical movement — may be rethinking its relationship with the Republican Party, too. Three years ago, I attended its annual meeting in Indianapolis and tagged along as the denomination’s former president and several of its leaders invited the assembled pastors across a walkway to an adjacent hotel for a Bush-Cheney campaign “pastors’ reception.”

Over soft drinks, Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition director then working for the Bush campaign, told the pastors just how far they could go for the campaign without jeopardizing their churches’ tax-exempt status. Among the suggestions: “host a citizenship Sunday for voter registration,” “identify someone who will help in voter registration and outreach” or organize a “ ‘party for the president’ with other pastors.”

Republicans should not expect that kind of treatment from Southern Baptists again any time soon. In June of last year, in one of the few upsets since conservatives consolidated their hold on the denomination 20 years ago, the establishment’s hand-picked candidates — well-known national figures in the convention — lost the internal election for the convention’s presidency. The winner, Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.” (It’s a formulation that comes up a lot in evangelical circles these days.)

I asked Page about the Bush-Cheney reception at the 2004 convention. He sounded appalled. “That will not be happening with me,” he said, repeating it for emphasis. “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.”

Southern Baptists called their denomination’s turn to the right the “conservative resurgence,” meaning both a crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates. Page said he considered his election “a clear sign” that rank-and-file Southern Baptists felt the “conservative ascendancy has gone far enough.”

Page is meeting personally with all the leading presidential candidates in both parties — Republican and Democrat. (His home state of South Carolina is holding an early primary.) But unlike some of his predecessors, he won’t endorse any of them, he said.

“Most of us Southern Baptists are right-wing Republicans,” he added. “But we also recognize that times change.” For example, Page said Christians should be wary of Republican ties to “big business.”

Elders like Dobson say the movement has been through doldrums before. Think of the face-off between the Republican Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton in the 1996 election. Dobson later said he had cast his ballot for a third party rather than vote for a moderate like Dole. But then, it was defeat that sapped morale; today, it is victory. Some younger evangelical conservatives say they are fighting just to keep their movement together. (Dobson told me he was too busy to comment for this article.)

The Rev. Rick Scarborough — founder of the advocacy organization Vision America, author of a book called “Liberalism Kills Kids” and at 57 an aspiring successor to Falwell or Dobson — has been barnstorming the country on what he calls a “Seventy Weeks to Save America Tour.”

“We are somewhat in disarray right now,” he told me, beginning a familiar story. “As a 26-year-old man, I heard there was a born-again Christian from Georgia running for president.” Millions of evangelicals turned out for the first time in 1976 to vote for Jimmy Carter. But then, the story goes, his support for feminism and abortion rights sent them running the other way.

“The first time I voted was for Carter,” Scarborough recalled. “The second time was for ‘anybody but Carter,’ because he had betrayed everything I hold dear.

“Unfortunately,” Scarborough concluded, “there is the same feeling in our community right now with George Bush. He appeared so right and so good. He talked a good game about family values around election time. But there has been a failure to follow through.”

For the conservative Christian leadership, what is most worrisome about the evangelical disappointment with President Bush is that it coincides with a widening philosophical rift. Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.

But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.

Older evangelical traditionalists like Prof. David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston argue that the newer approaches represent a “capitulation” to the broader culture — similar to the capitulation that in his view led the mainline churches into decline. Proponents of the new evangelicalism, on the other hand, say their broader agenda reflects a frustration with the scarce victories in the culture war and revulsion at the moral entanglements of partisan alliances (Abu Ghraib, Jack Abramoff). Scot McKnight, an evangelical theologian at North Park University in Chicago, said, “It is the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.”

Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,” John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.”

Some rebellious evangelical pastors and theologians of the new school refer to themselves as the emergent church. Others who are less openly rebellious but share a similar approach point to the examples of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. “What Warren and Hybels are doing is reshaping the perception of what it means to be a Christian in our country and our world,” McKnight says.

Warren and Hybels are also highly entrepreneurial. Each has built a network of thousands of mostly evangelical churches that rely on their ministries for sermon ideas, worship plans or audio-video materials to enliven services. As a result, their influence may rival that of any denominational leader in the country.

Warren, pastor of the Saddleback church in Lake Forest, Calif., is the author of the best seller “The Purpose Driven Life.” His church has sold materials to thousands of other churches for “campaigns” called 40 Days of Purpose and, more recently, 40 Days of Community. If more Christians worked to alleviate needs in their local communities, he suggests in the church’s promotional materials, “the church would become known more for the love it shows than for what it is against” a thinly veiled dig at the conservative Christian “culture war.”

Warren is clearly a theological and cultural conservative. Before the 2004 election, he wrote a letter to other pastors emphasizing the need to combat abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But these days Warren talks much more often about fighting AIDS and poverty. He raised hackles among conservatives last year by having Barack Obama give a speech at his church. And he also came under fire last year when he traveled to Damascus, Syria, where he implicitly criticized the Bush administration for refusing to talk with unfriendly nations.

“Isolation and silence has never solved conflict,” he said in a press release defending his trip.

Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, is very possibly the single-most-influential pastor in America; in the last 15 years, his Willow Creek Association has grown to include more than 12,000 churches. Many invite their staff members and lay leaders to participate by telecast in Willow Creek’s annual leadership conferences, creating a virtual gathering of tens of thousands. Dozens of churches in Wichita, including Central Christian and other past bastions of conservative activism, are part of the association.

As his stature has grown, Hybels has seemed more willing to irk Christian conservative political leaders — and even some in his own congregation. He set off a furor a few years ago when he invited former President Bill Clinton to speak at one of his conferences. And the Iraq war has brought into sharp relief Hybels’s differences with conservatives like Dobson.

Most conservative Christian leaders have resolutely supported Bush’s foreign policy. Dobson and others have even talked about defending Western civilization from radical Islam as a precondition for protecting family values. But on the eve of the Iraq invasion, Hybels preached a sermon called “Why War?” Laying out three approaches to war — realism, just-war theory and pacifism — he implored members of his congregation to re-examine their own thinking and then try to square it with the Bible. In the process, he left little doubt about where he personally stood. He called himself a pacifist.

Hybels traced the “J curve” of mounting deaths from war through the centuries. “In case you are wondering about this, wonder how God feels about all this,” he said. “It breaks the heart of God.”

At his annual leadership conference this summer, Hybels interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. To some Christian conservatives, it was quite a provocation. Carter, after all, was their first great disappointment, a Southern Baptist who denounced the conservative takeover and an early critic of the Bush administration. Some pastors canceled plans to attend.

“I think that a superpower ought to be the exemplification of a commitment to peace,” Carter told Hybels, who nodded along. “I would like for anyone in the world that’s threatened with conflict to say to themselves immediately: ‘Why don’t we go to Washington? They believe in peace and they will help us get peace.’ ” Carter added: “This is just a simple but important extrapolation from what a human being ought to do, and what a human being ought to do is what Jesus Christ did, who was a champion of peace.”

In a conversation I had with him, Hybels told me he considered politics a path to “heartache and disappointment” for a Christian leader. But he also described the message of his Willow Creek Association to its member churches in terms that would warm a liberal’s heart.

“We have just pounded the drum again and again that, for churches to reach their full redemptive potential, they have to do more than hold services — they have to try to transform their communities,” he said. “If there is racial injustice in your community, you have to speak to that. If there is educational injustice, you have to do something there. If the poor are being neglected by the government or being oppressed in some way, then you have to stand up for the poor.”

In the past, Hybels has scrupulously avoided criticizing conservative Christian political figures like Falwell or Dobson. But in my talk with him, he argued that the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement had lost touch with their base. “The Indians are saying to the chiefs, ‘We are interested in more than your two or three issues,’ ” Hybels said. “We are interested in the poor, in racial reconciliation, in global poverty and AIDS, in the plight of women in the developing world.”

He brought up the Rev. Jim Wallis, the lonely voice of the tiny evangelical left. Wallis has long argued that secular progressives could make common cause with theologically conservative Christians. “What Jim has been talking about is coming to fruition,” Hybels said.

Conservative Christian leaders in Washington acknowledge a “leftward drift” among evangelicals, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the movement’s chief advocate in Washington. He told me he believed that Hybels and many of his admirers had, in effect, fallen away from orthodox evangelical theology. Perkins compared the phenomenon to the century-old division in American Protestantism between the liberal mainline and the orthodox evangelical churches. “It is almost like another split coming within the evangelicals,” he said.

Wondering how those theological and political debates were unfolding in conservative Wichita, I sought out the Rev. Gene Carlson, another prominent conservative Christian pastor who left his church last year. He spent four decades as the senior pastor of the Westlink Christian Church, expanding it to 7,000 members. He was one of the most important local leaders of the Summer of Mercy abortion protests. He tapped Westlink’s collection plate to help finance its operations and even led a battalion of about 40 clergy members and hundreds of lay people to jail in an act of civil disobedience.

Sitting with his wife in a quiet living room with teddy bears on the bookshelves, Carlson, who is 70, told me he is one member of the movement’s founding generation who has had second thoughts. He said he still considers abortion evil. He called the anti-abortion protests “prophetic,” in the sense of the Old Testament prophets who warned of God’s wrath. But Carlson was blunt about the results. “It didn’t really change abortion,” he said.

“I thought in my enthusiasm,” he told me with a smile, “that somehow we could band together and change things politically and everything will be fine.” But the closing of Dr. Tiller’s clinic was fleeting. Electing Christian politicians never seemed to change much. “When you mix politics and religion,” Carlson said, “you get politics.”

In more recent battles, Carlson has hung back. On the Sunday before the referendum on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Carlson reminded his congregation that homosexuality was hardly the only form of sex the Bible condemned. Any extramarital sex is a sin, he told his congregation, so they should not point fingers.

“We wouldn’t want to exclude some group because we thought their sin was worse than ours,” Carlson told me with a laugh.

Carlson is a registered Republican, though he now considers himself an independent. He volunteered that he now leans left on some social-welfare issues and the environment. He considers himself among the “green evangelicals” who see a biblical mandate for government action to stop global warming. The Westlink church is another member of Hybels’s Willow Creek Association and a satellite location for telecasts of the annual leadership conference. Carlson said he admired Hybels for “challenging some of the sacred cows that we evangelicals have built.”

“There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,” Carlson said, “and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.” He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. “Now it is a growing phenomenon,” he said.

“The religious right peaked a long time ago,” he added. “As a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.”

These days, Westlink has found less confrontational ways to oppose abortion, mainly by helping to pay for a medical center called Choices. Housed in a cozy-looking white-shingled cottage next to Dr. Tiller’s bunkerlike abortion facility, Choices discourages women from ending pregnancies by offering 3-D ultrasound scans and adoption advice.

Carlson’s protégé and successor, Todd Carter, 42, said: “I don’t believe the problem of abortion will be solved by overturning Roe v. Wade. It won’t. To me, it is a Gospel issue.”

The Rev. Joe Wright, the longtime senior pastor who built Central Christian to 7,000 members, was the third leading pastor in Wichita to step down at the end of last year. He is a tall, heavy man, and he embraced me in a sweaty bear hug the first time we met, at a local chain restaurant.

Wright, who is 64, had been another leader of the Operation Mercy protests. But unlike Carlson, he plunged further into conservative politics, eventually as a host of the radio show “Answering the Call,” with Fox. They spent months together traveling the state and lobbying the Statehouse during the same-sex marriage fight.

Wright retired in good standing with his congregation, but he told me the political battle had taken a toll.

“On Sunday morning when I would mention it, there were people who would hang their heads and say, ‘Oh, here we go again,’ ” he said. “And then, of course, some of them wouldn’t come back.”

Wright said he was worried about theological and political trends among young evangelicals, even in Kansas. “If we had to depend on the young evangelical pastors to get us a marriage amendment here in Kansas it never would have happened,” Wright said.

He went on to say he was dismayed to feel resistance to his political sermons and voter-registration drives from younger associate pastors at his own church, some of whom moved elsewhere. (Some of his parishioners had already told me the same thing, separately.)

“Even in the groups I travel in and grew up in — the preachers who are from the same background I was in, who run in the same circles I ran in, who went to the same schools I did — I don’t find many young evangelical preachers who are willing to stand up and take a stand on the hard issues, because they think they might offend somebody,” he said.

“I think the Gospel is offensive, and I think the cross is offensive,” Wright continued. “I think Jesus loved everybody and I think he loved the Pharisees, but he certainly told them how the cow eats the cabbage.”

Paul Hill is one of the young associate pastors who left Central Christian after philosophical clashes with Wright. He took a band of young members with him when he started his own emergent-style church, the Wheatland Mission. “Even in Wichita, times have changed,” Hill said. “I think people will hear the Gospel better when it is expressed not just verbally but holistically, through acts of hospitality and by bringing people together.

“In the evangelical church in general there is kind of a push back against the Republican party and a feeling of being used by the Republican political machine,” he continued. “There are going to be a lot of evangelicals willing to vote for a Democrat because there are 40 million people without health insurance and a Democrat is going to do something about that.”

With Wright, Carlson and Fox out of the spotlight, new religious leaders are stepping to the fore. When legalized gambling was proposed in the Wichita area this year, the pastor who took the lead in rallying other clergy members to stop the measure was Michael Gardner of the First United Methodist Church, a mainline liberal who supports abortion rights and jousted with Fox over the same-sex marriage amendment on competing church telecasts.

After decades when evangelical megachurches have exploded at the expense of dwindling mainline congregations, Gardner is poaching the other way. Each Sunday night he convenes an informal emergent church worship group of his own, known as Next Wichita. Several dozen people, mostly 20 to 30 years old, show up to break bread, talk Scripture and plan volunteer projects. “People in that age group are much more attracted to participatory theology, very resistant to being told what to do or what to think,” he said.

Patrick Bergquist, a former associate pastor at a local evangelical church who as a child attended Immanuel Baptist, became a regular. “From a theological standpoint, I am an evangelical,” Bergquist, who is 28, explained to me. “But I don’t mean that anyone who is gay is necessarily going to hell, or that anyone who has an abortion is going to hell.” After a life of voting Republican, he said, he recently made a small contribution to the Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

“Is the religious right dead?” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told me that question was the title of the first chapter of a new book he is writing with Harry Jackson, a socially conservative African-American pastor.

Perkins’s answer is emphatically no — “we are seeing a lot of pastors coming back like never before” — but the 2008 election is the movement’s first big test since the triumph and letdown with President Bush. And so far most Christian conservative leaders do not like what they see. Although all the Republican primary candidates, including Giuliani, spoke at the Family Research Council’s “values voters” meeting last weekend, only the dark horses have consistent conservative records on abortion, gay rights and religion in public life.

Of these, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, stands out in the polls and in his rhetoric. At last fall’s values-voters meetings, the other candidates focused on establishing their Christian conservative credentials. Huckabee dispensed with that by reminding his audience of his years as a pastor. Then he challenged the crowd to give more money to their churches and talked about education and health care. On the campaign trail, he criticizes chief executives’ pay and says his faith demands environmental regulation. “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car,” Huckabee said in a recent debate. “We shouldn’t be satisfied that elderly people are being abused or neglected in nursing homes.”

Huckabee told me that he welcomed a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he said, repeating a campaign theme.

But the leaders of the Christian conservative movement have not rallied to him. Many say he cannot win because he has not raised enough money. Perkins and others have criticized Huckabee for taking too soft an approach to the Middle East. Others worry that his record on taxes will anger allies on the right. And some Christian conservatives take his “gestation period” line as a slight to their movement.

“They finally have the soldier they have been waiting for, and they shouldn’t send me out into the battlefield without supplies,” Huckabee told me in exasperation. He argued that the movement’s leaders would “become irrelevant” if they started putting political viability or low taxes ahead of their principles about abortion and marriage.

“In biblical terms, it is like the salt losing its flavor; it’s sand,” Huckabee said. “Some of them have spent too long in Washington. . . . I think they are going to have a hard time going out into the pews and saying tax policy is what Jesus is about, that he said, ‘Come unto me all you who are overtaxed and I will give you rest.’ ”

Up to this point, though, most conservative Christian leaders are still locked in debate about which front-runner they dislike the least. Dobson’s public statements have traced the arc of their dissatisfaction. Last October, he observed that grass-roots evangelicals would have a hard time voting for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon. In January, he said he could never vote for Senator John McCain. More recently, Dobson panned Fred Thompson, too, for opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to,’ ” Dobson wrote in an e-mail message to allies. “Not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

Finally, at the end of last month, Dobson was the foremost among the roughly 50 Christian conservative organizers who declared they would support a third-party candidate if the nomination went to Giuliani, who is their greatest fear. Some even talk of McCain — once anathema to them — as a better bet.

I could see why they were worried. Among the evangelicals of suburban Wichita, I found that Giuliani was easily the most popular of the Republican candidates, even among churchgoers who knew his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. Some trusted him to fight Islamic radicalism; others praised his cleanup of New York.

“There are a few issues we are on different sides of — a lot of it is around abortion — and he is not the most spiritual guy,” said Kent Brummer, a retired Boeing engineer leaving services at Central Christian. “But to me that doesn’t mean that he would not make a good president, if he represents both sides.

“What I liked about George Bush is all of his moral side and all that,” Brummer added. “But somehow he didn’t have the strength to govern the way we hoped he would and that he should have.”

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

Many evangelicals are not sure what to make of it. “Shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life?” David Brody, a commentator for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, asked approvingly in response to Obama’s statements.

Many conservative Christian leaders say they can count on the specter of a second Clinton presidency to fire up their constituents. But the prospect of an Obama-Giuliani race is another matter. “You would have a bunch of people who traditionally vote Republican going over to Obama,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the Christian conservative American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., known for its consumer boycotts over obscenity or gay issues.

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. “There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith,” Welsh said. “Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?”

“Obama sounds too much like Osama,” said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. “When he says his name, I am like, ‘I am not voting for a Muslim!’ ”

Fox, meanwhile, is already preparing to do his part to get Wichita’s conservative faithful to the polls next November. Standing before a few hundred worshipers at the Johnny Western Theater last summer, Fox warned his new congregation not to let go of that old-time religion. “Hell is just as hot as it ever was,” he reminded them. “It just has more people in it.”

Fox told me: “I think the religious community is probably reflective of the rest of the nation — it is very divided right now. This election process is going to reveal a lot about where the religious right and the religious community is. It will show unity or the lack of it.”

But liberals, he said, should not start gloating. “Some might compare the religious right to a snake,” he said. “We may be in our hole right now, but we can come out and bite you at any time.”

David D. Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.

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Challenging the Generals

2007-08-28T09:19:00.000-04:00

The New York Times
August 26, 2007
By FRED KAPLAN

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”
Yingling’s article — published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal — noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”
Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”
Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on obedience and hierarchy. Yet the scene at Fort Knox reflected a brewing conflict between the Army’s junior and senior officer corps — lieutenants and captains on one hand, generals on the other, with majors and colonels (“field-grade officers”) straddling the divide and sometimes taking sides. The cause of this tension is the war in Iraq, but the consequences are broader. They revolve around the obligations of an officer, the nature of future warfare and the future of the Army itself. And these tensions are rising at a time when the war has stretched the Army’s resources to the limit, when junior officers are quitting at alarming rates and when political leaders are divided or uncertain about America’s — and its military’s — role in the world.
Colonel Yingling’s article gave these tensions voice; it spelled out the issues and the stakes; and it located their roots in the Army’s own institutional culture, specifically in the growing disconnect between this culture — which is embodied by the generals — and the complex realities that junior officers, those fighting the war, are confronting daily on the ground. The article was all the more potent because it was written by an active-duty officer still on the rise. It was a career risk, just as, on a smaller scale, standing up and asking the Army vice chief of staff about the article was a risk.
In response to the captains’ questions, General Cody acknowledged, as senior officers often do now, that the Iraq war was “mismanaged” in its first phases. The original plan, he said, did not anticipate the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the disruption of oil production or the rise of an insurgency. Still, he rejected the broader critique. “I think we’ve got great general officers that are meeting tough demands,” he insisted. He railed instead at politicians for cutting back the military in the 1990s. “Those are the people who ought to be held accountable,” he said.
Before and just after America’s entry into World War II, Gen. George Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, purged 31 of his 42 division and corps commanders, all of them generals, and 162 colonels on the grounds that they were unsuited for battle. Over the course of the war, he rid the Army of 500 colonels. He reached deep into the lower ranks to find talented men to replace them. For example, Gen. James Gavin, the highly decorated commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was a mere major in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Today, President Bush maintains that the nation is in a war against terrorism — what Pentagon officials call “the long war” — in which civilization itself is at stake. Yet six years into this war, the armed forces — not just the Army, but also the Air Force, Navy and Marines — have changed almost nothing about the way their promotional systems and their entire bureaucracies operate.
On the lower end of the scale, things have changed — but for the worse. West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.
Col. Don Snider, a longtime professor at West Point, sees a “trust gap” between junior and senior officers. There has always been a gap, to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel let down.
The gap is widening further, Snider told me, because of this war’s operating tempo, the “unrelenting pace” at which soldiers are rotated into Iraq for longer tours — and a greater number of tours — than they signed up for. Many soldiers, even those who support the war, are wearying of the endless cycle. The cycle is a result of two decisions. The first occurred at the start of the war, when the senior officers assented to the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, to send in far fewer troops than they had recommended. The second took place two years later, well into the insurgency phase of the war, when top officers declared they didn’t need more troops, though most of them knew that in fact they did. “Many junior officers,” Snider said, “see this op tempo as stemming from the failure of senior officers to speak out.”
Paul Yingling did not set out to cause a stir. He grew up in a working-class part of Pittsburgh. His father owned a bar; no one in his family went to college. He joined the Army in 1984 at age 17, because he was a troubled kid — poor grades and too much drinking and brawling — who wanted to turn his life around, and he did. He went to Duquesne University, a small Catholic school, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship; went on active duty; rose through the ranks; and, by the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was a lieutenant commanding an artillery battery, directing cannon fire against Saddam Hussein’s army.
“When I was in the gulf war, I remember thinking, This is easier than it was at training exercises,” he told me earlier this month. He was sent to Bosnia in December 1995 as part of the first peacekeeping operation after the signing of the Dayton accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. “This was nothing like training,” he recalled. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he was trained almost entirely for conventional combat operations: straightforward clashes, brigades against brigades. (Even now, about 70 percent of the training at the Captains Career Course is for conventional warfare.) In Bosnia, there was no clear enemy, no front line and no set definition of victory. “I kept wondering why things weren’t as well rehearsed as they’d been in the gulf war,” he said.
Upon returning, he spent the next six years pondering that question. He studied international relations at the University of Chicago’s graduate school and wrote a master’s thesis about the circumstances under which outside powers can successfully intervene in civil wars. (One conclusion: There aren’t many.) He then taught at West Point, where he also read deeply in Western political theory. Yingling was deployed to Iraq in July 2003 as an executive officer collecting loose munitions and training Iraq’s civil-defense corps. “The corps deserted or joined the insurgency on first contact,” he recalled. “It was a disaster.”
In the late fall of 2003, his first tour of duty over, Yingling was sent to Fort Sill, Okla., the Army’s main base for artillery soldiers, and wrote long memos to the local generals, suggesting new approaches to the war in Iraq. One suggestion was that since artillery rockets were then playing little role, artillery soldiers should become more skilled in training Iraqi soldiers; that, he thought, would be vital to Iraq’s future stability. No one responded to his memos, he says. He volunteered for another tour of combat and became deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was fighting jihadist insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar.
The commander of the third regiment, Col. H. R. McMaster, was a historian as well as a decorated soldier. He figured that Iraq could not build its own institutions, political or military, until its people felt safe. So he devised his own plan, in which he and his troops cleared the town of insurgents — and at the same time formed alliances and built trust with local sheiks and tribal leaders. The campaign worked for a while, but only because McMaster flooded the city with soldiers — about 1,000 of them per square kilometer. Earlier, as Yingling drove around to other towns and villages, he saw that most Iraqis were submitting to whatever gang or militia offered them protection, because United States and coalition forces weren’t anywhere around. And that was because the coalition had entered the war without enough troops. Yingling was seeing the consequences of this decision up close in the terrible insecurity of most Iraqis’ lives.
In February 2006, Yingling returned to Fort Sill. That April, six retired Army and Marine generals publicly criticized Rumsfeld, who was still the secretary of defense, for sending too few troops to Iraq. Many junior and field-grade officers reacted with puzzlement or disgust. Their common question: Where were these generals when they still wore the uniform? Why didn’t they speak up when their words might have counted? One general who had spoken up, Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, was publicly upbraided and ostracized by Rumsfeld; other active-duty generals got the message and stayed mum.
That December, Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers wounded in Iraq. “I was watching these soldiers wheeling into this room, or in some cases having to be wheeled in by their wives or mothers,” he recalled. “And I said to myself: ‘These soldiers were doing their jobs. The senior officers were not doing theirs. We’re not giving our soldiers the tools and training to succeed.’ I had to go public.”
Soon after Yingling’s article appeared, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Tex., reportedly called a meeting of the roughly 200 captains on his base, all of whom had served in Iraq, for the purpose of putting this brazen lieutenant colonel in his place. According to The Wall Street Journal, he told his captains that Army generals are “dedicated, selfless servants.” Yingling had no business judging generals because he has “never worn the shoes of a general.” By implication, Hammond was warning his captains that they had no business judging generals, either. Yingling was stationed at Fort Hood at the time, preparing to take command of an artillery battalion. From the steps of his building, he could see the steps of General Hammond’s building. He said he sent the general a copy of his article before publication as a courtesy, and he never heard back; nor was he notified of the general’s meeting with his captains.
The “trust gap” between junior and senior officers is hardly universal. Many junior officers at Fort Knox and elsewhere have no complaints about the generals — or regard the matter as way above their pay grade. As Capt. Ryan Kranc, who has served two tours in Iraq, one as a commander, explained to me, “I’m more interested in whether my guys can secure a convoy.” He dismissed complaints about troop shortages. “When you’re in a system, you’re never going to get everything you ask for,” he said, “but I still have to accomplish a mission. That’s my job. If they give me a toothpick, dental floss and a good hunting knife, I will accomplish the mission.”
An hour after General Cody’s talk at Fort Knox, several captains met to discuss the issue over beers. Capt. Garrett Cathcart, who has served in Iraq as a platoon leader, said: “The culture of the Army is to accomplish the mission, no matter what. That’s a good thing.” Matt Wignall, who was the first captain to ask General Cody about the Yingling article, agreed that a mission-oriented culture was “a good thing, but it can be dangerous.” He added: “It is so rare to hear someone in the Army say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ But sometimes it takes courage to say, ‘I don’t have the capability.’ ” Before the Iraq war, when Rumsfeld overrode the initial plans of the senior officers, “somebody should have put his foot down,” Wignall said.
Lt. Col. Allen Gill, who just retired as director of the R.O.T.C. program at Georgetown University, has heard versions of this discussion among his cadets for years. He raises a different concern about the Army’s “can do” culture. “You’re not brought up in the Army to tell people how you can’t get things done, and that’s fine, that’s necessary,” he said. “But when you get promoted to a higher level of strategic leadership, you have to have a different outlook. You’re supposed to make clear, cold calculations of risk — of the probabilities of victory and defeat.”
The problem, he said, is that it’s hard for officers — hard for people in any profession — to switch their basic approach to life so abruptly. As Yingling put it in his article, “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late 40s.”
Yingling’s commander at Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, documented a similar crisis in the case of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after the war, McMaster wrote a doctoral dissertation that he turned into a book called “Dereliction of Duty.” It concluded that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire. When McMaster’s book was published in 1997, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ordered all commanders to read it — and to express disagreements to their superiors, even at personal risk. Since then, “Dereliction of Duty” has been recommended reading for Army officers.
Yet before the start of the Iraq war and during the early stages of the fighting, the Joint Chiefs once again fell silent. Justin Rosenbaum, the captain at Fort Knox who asked General Cody whether any generals would be held accountable for the failures in Iraq, said he was disturbed by this parallel between the two wars. “We’ve read the McMaster book,” he said. “It’s startling that we’re repeating the same mistakes.”
McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster two years in a row.
McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications. One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.” A retired Army two-star general, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to anger his friends on the promotion boards, agreed. “When you turn down a guy like McMaster,” he told me, “that sends a potent message to everybody down the chain. I don’t know, maybe there were good reasons not to promote him. But the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in rewarding agents of change.’ ”
Members of the board, he said, want to promote officers whose careers look like their own. Today’s generals rose through the officer corps of the peacetime Army. Many of them fought in the last years of Vietnam, and some fought in the gulf war. But to the extent they have combat experience, it has been mainly tactical, not strategic. They know how to secure an objective on a battlefield, how to coordinate firepower and maneuver. But they don’t necessarily know how to deal with an enemy that’s flexible, with a scenario that has not been rehearsed.
“Those rewarded are the can-do, go-to people,” the retired two-star general told me. “Their skill is making the trains run on time. So why are we surprised that, when the enemy becomes adaptive, we get caught off guard? If you raise a group of plumbers, you shouldn’t be upset if they can’t do theoretical physics.”
There are, of course, exceptions, most notably General Petraeus. He wrote an article for a recent issue of The American Interest, a Washington-based public-policy journal, urging officers to attend civilian graduate schools and get out of their “intellectual comfort zones” — useful for dealing with today’s adaptive enemies.
Yet many Army officers I spoke with say Petraeus’s view is rare among senior officers. Two colonels told me that when they were captains, their commanders strongly discouraged them from attending not just graduate school but even the Army’s Command and General Staff College, warning that it would be a diversion from their career paths. “I got the impression that I’d be better off counting bedsheets in the Baghdad Embassy than studying at Harvard,” one colonel said.
Harvard’s merits aside, some junior officers agree that the promotion system discourages breadth. Capt. Kip Kowalski, an infantry officer in the Captains Career Course at Fort Knox, is a proud soldier in the can-do tradition. He is impatient with critiques of superiors; he prefers to stay focused on his job. “But I am worried,” he said, “that generals these days are forced to be narrow.” Kowalski would like to spend a few years in a different branch of the Army — say, as a foreign area officer — and then come back to combat operations. He says he thinks the switch would broaden his skills, give him new perspectives and make him a better officer. But the rules don’t allow switching back and forth among specialties. “I have to decide right now whether I want to do ops or something else,” he said. “If I go F. A. O., I can never come back.”
In October 2006, seven months before his essay on the failure of generalship appeared, Yingling and Lt. Col. John Nagl, another innovative officer, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal called “New Rules for New Enemies,” in which they wrote: “The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”
In late June, Yingling took command of an artillery battalion. This means he will most likely be promoted to full colonel. This assignment, however, was in the works nearly a year ago, long before he wrote his critique of the generals. His move and probable promotion say nothing about whether he’ll be promoted further — or whether, as some of his admirers fear, his career will now grind to a halt.
Nagl — the author of an acclaimed book about counterinsurgency (“Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife”), a former operations officer in Iraq and the subject of a New York Times Magazine article a few years ago — has since taken command of a unit at Fort Riley, Kan., that trains United States soldiers to be advisers to Iraqi security forces. Pentagon officials have said that these advisers are crucial to America’s future military policy. Yet Nagl has written that soldiers have been posted to this unit “on an ad hoc basis” and that few of the officers selected to train them have ever been advisers themselves.
Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson, a professor at West Point and former planning officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, said the fate of Nagl’s unit — the degree to which it attracted capable, ambitious soldiers — depended on the answer to one question: “Will serving as an adviser be seen as equal to serving as a combat officer in the eyes of the promotion boards? The jury is still out.”
“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal mine of Army reform,” the retired two-star general I spoke with told me. “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the traditional culture still rules.”
failure sometimes compels an institution to change its ways. The last time the Army undertook an overhaul was in the wake of the Vietnam War. At the center of those reforms was an officer named Huba Wass de Czege. Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSH de tsay-guh) graduated from West Point and served two tours of duty in Vietnam, the second as a company commander in the Central Highlands. He devised innovative tactics, leading four-man teams — at the time they were considered unconventionally small — on ambush raids at night. His immediate superiors weren’t keen on his approach or attitude, despite his successes. But after the war ended and a few creative officers took over key posts, they recruited Wass de Czege to join them.
In 1982, he was ordered to rewrite the Army’s field manual on combat operations. At his own initiative, he read the classics of military strategy — Clausewitz’s “On War,” Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” B. H. Liddell Hart’s “Strategy” — none of which had been on his reading list at West Point. And he incorporated many of their lessons along with his own experiences from Vietnam. Where the old edition assumed static clashes of firepower and attrition, Wass de Czege’s revision emphasized speed, maneuver and taking the offensive. He was asked to create a one-year graduate program for the most promising young officers. Called the School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS, it brought strategic thinking back into the Army — at least for a while.
Now a retired one-star general, though an active Army consultant, Wass de Czege has publicly praised Yingling’s article. (Yingling was a graduate of SAMS in 2002, well after its founder moved on.) In an essay for the July issue of Army magazine, Wass de Czege wrote that today’s junior officers “feel they have much relevant experience [that] those senior to them lack,” yet the senior officers “have not listened to them.” These junior officers, he added, remind him of his own generation of captains, who held the same view during and just after Vietnam.
“The crux of the problem in our Army,” Wass de Czege wrote, “is that officers are not systematically taught how to cope with unstructured problems.” Counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all about unstructured problems. The junior and field-grade officers, who command at the battalion level and below, deal with unstructured problems — adapting to the insurgents’ ever-changing tactics — as a matter of course. Many generals don’t, and never had to, deal with such problems, either in war or in their training drills. Many of them may not fully recognize just how distinct and difficult these problems are.
Speaking by phone from his home outside Fort Leavenworth, Wass de Czege emphasized that he was impressed with most of today’s senior officers. Compared with those of his time, they are more capable, open and intelligent (most officers today, junior and senior, have college degrees, for instance). “You’re not seeing any of the gross incompetence that was common in my day,” he said. He added, however, that today’s generals are still too slow to change. “The Army tends to be consensus-driven at the top,” he said. “There’s a good side to that. We’re steady as a rock. You call us to arms, we’ll be there. But when you roll a lot of changes at us, it takes awhile. The young guys have to drive us to it.”
The day after his talk at Fort Knox, General Cody, back at his office in the Pentagon, reiterated his “faith in the leadership of the general officers.” Asked about complaints that junior officers are forced to follow narrow paths to promotion, he said, “We’re trying to do just the opposite.” In the works are new incentives to retain officers, including not just higher bonuses but free graduate school and the right to choose which branch of the Army to serve in. “I don’t want everybody to think there’s one road map to colonel or general,” he said. He denied that promotion boards picked candidates in their own image. This year, he said, he was on the board that picked new brigadier generals, and one of them, Jeffrey Buchanan, had never commanded a combat brigade; his last assignment was training Iraqi security forces. One colonel, interviewed later, said: “That’s a good sign. They’ve never picked anybody like that before. But that’s just one out of 38 brigadier generals they picked. It’s still very much the exception.”
There is a specter haunting the debate over Yingling’s article — the specter of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. During World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened to resign if the civilian commanders didn’t order air support for the invasion of Normandy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill acceded. But during the Korean War, MacArthur — at the time, perhaps the most popular public figure in America — demanded that President Truman let him attack China. Truman fired him. History has redeemed both presidents’ decisions. But in terms of the issues that Yingling, McMaster and others have raised, was there really a distinction? Weren’t both generals speaking what they regarded as “truth to power”?
The very discussion of these issues discomforts many senior officers because they take very seriously the principle of civilian control. They believe it is not their place to challenge the president or his duly appointed secretary of defense, certainly not in public, especially not in wartime. The ethical codes are ambiguous on how firmly an officer can press an argument without crossing the line. So, many generals prefer to keep a substantial distance from that line — to keep the prospect of a constitutional crisis from even remotely arising.
On a blog Yingling maintains at the Web site of Small Wars Journal, an independent journal of military theory, he has acknowledged these dilemmas, but he hasn’t disentangled them. For example, if generals do speak up, and the president ignores their advice, what should they do then — salute and follow orders, resign en masse or criticize the president publicly? At this level of discussion, the junior and midlevel officers feel uncomfortable, too.
Yingling’s concern is more narrowly professional, but it should matter greatly to future policy makers who want to consult their military advisers. The challenge is how to ensure that generals possess the experience and analytical prowess to formulate sound military advice and the “moral courage,” as Yingling put it, to take responsibility for that advice and for its resulting successes or failures. The worry is that too few generals today possess either set of qualities — and that the promotional system impedes the rise of officers who do.
As today’s captains and majors come up through the ranks, the culture may change. One question is how long that will take. Another question is whether the most innovative of those junior officers will still be in the Army by the time the top brass decides reform is necessary. As Colonel Wilson, the West Point instructor, put it, “When that moment comes, will there be enough of the right folks in the right slots to make the necessary changes happen?”
Fred Kaplan is the national security columnist for Slate and author of the forthcoming book “Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.”

Albright: Ignore religion 'at our own peril'

2007-08-23T11:13:00.000-04:00

Story Highlights
Albright served as U.S. secretary of state under former President Clinton
She wrote about the relationship between politics and religion in her 2006 book
"Religion is instrumental in shaping ideas and policies," she says
Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports CNN.com is featuring from an upcoming, six-hour television event, "God's Warriors," hosted by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As U.S. secretary of state under former President Clinton, Madeleine Albright invested long hours in the Middle East peace process. She wrote about the relationship between politics and religion in her 2006 book, "The Mighty and the Almighty."
CNN producer Jen Christensen recently spoke with Albright for "God's Warriors." Here is an edited portion of their conversation:
CNN: Growing up I was told that in polite conversation you never talk about two things: politics and religion; however, our documentary, "God's Warriors," is going to do just that. Part of the problem though in looking at these issues is the loaded quality of the language. Even our starting point. We essentially had to create a term, "God's Warriors," as the traditional term "fundamentalism" seemed problematic. Did you encounter the same problem when you were writing "The Mighty and the Almighty"?Watch the making of the TV special "God's Warriors" »
Albright: Well, I think it's a very hard term, fundamentalism, as you're obviously finding. Historically, it's a term that described Christians who believed that everything that was in the Bible was exactly so. But now it's been used to describe everybody in the three Abrahamic religions who is conservative or reactionary. One of the things that I found in writing my book [was] that fundamentalism was a term that I was having trouble with. Because it has gotten ascribed to it a lot of negative associations.
CNN: In your book, you argue for a better understanding of religion in the U.S. foreign policy arena. Isn't that a revolutionary idea for this generation of diplomats trained more in the realist school of foreign policy?
Albright: As a practitioner of foreign policy, I certainly come from the generation of people who used to say, "X problem is complicated enough. Let's not bring God and religion into it." But through my being in office, and as I explored the subject much further in writing "The Mighty and the Almighty," I really thought that the opposite is true. In order to effectively conduct foreign policy today, you have to understand the role of God and religion. ... My sense is that we don't fully understand, because one, it's pretty complicated, and two, everyone in the U.S. believes in a separation of church and state, so you think, "Well, if we don't believe in the convergence of church and state, then perhaps we shouldn't worry about the role of religion." I think we do that now at our own peril. Religion is instrumental in shaping ideas and policies. It's an essential part of everyday life in a whole host of countries. And obviously it plays a role in how these countries behave, so we need to know what the religious influence is.
CNN: We interviewed a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem, Danny Seidemann, who has on occasion helped peace negotiators in Israel get ready for talks. He said one of the main problems with President Clinton's Camp David [talks] was that a lot of the preparation was done by "yuppies in Ramallah, yuppies in Tel Aviv and yuppies in the Beltway." And that they didn't really understand the religious people who in the end would have to buy into the results of the negotiations in order for them to succeed. He said without that understanding the agreement was doomed.
Albright: Well, I can't say I fully agree with him. I've talked about what I think we did right and what we did wrong at Camp David. I think that there was a mistake made, which was not understanding how difficult the issue of Jerusalem and the holy places would be. If Jerusalem was just a real estate issue, we would have resolved it a long time ago. But because the parties believe that God gave them that piece of land, then obviously there's another presence in the room that we needed to take into account. I disagree with the statement because President Clinton knew a great deal about the religious background. I had the honor of working for two democratic presidents, President Carter and President Clinton, and they're both very religious and both very knowledgeable about the religious backgrounds of the Middle East.
CNN: The fate of Jerusalem seems to be a particularly tricky issue.
Albright: Anybody that can really solve that issue is a Solomon. With this being holy to all three of the Abrahamic religions, it's very difficult. And religion, rather than bringing people together on this, is driving them apart, which ... I don't think [is] what is intended. It's so interesting; we're talking about the whole issue of sovereignty here. Because the parties both believed that God gave them that little piece of land, we started playing with a term, which was that it belonged to God. Divine sovereignty. Anybody who's been to Jerusalem can see why it is so complicated. Physically, religious holy places are completely intertwined, one on top of the other. So in many ways, there's great appeal to saying it belongs to God, and then trying to figure out how it [is] administered, maybe through some international group of some kind.
CNN: Is Jerusalem a place where we could have this kind of utopian area, where the three faiths could all live peacefully together?
Albright: Well, ideally, though it certainly doesn't seem that way at this point. And while the United States or the [Mideast] Quartet needs to play a key role in what to do with Jerusalem, ultimately the parties there in Israel are the ones that have to make the hard decisions. If there ever is a will to do this, just think about the incredible opportunities here. People would be able to learn about all three of these great religions in the same place. They'd be able to see how they relate to each other. It does sound a little utopian, well, very utopian at this point, but Jerusalem is an incredible place.
I found the first time I went to Jerusalem, my initial reaction was, people are arguing over all this all the time, it made me think, well, there can't be a God, why would God put up with this? And then I had the total opposite reaction. One that stays with me, which is that there are so many holy places and symbols there, and all anybody talks about is their relationship to those symbols and to God, and therefore the power of God must be so strong there. I just think that it would be much better if people could figure out ... how to agree about it.
CNN: So, therefore, how to figure out the fate Jerusalem is the perfect example of why we need to include religious understanding in our foreign policy.
Albright: Definitely. I am not a theologian, and I have not turned into a religious mystic, but I am a practical problem solver. So I'm looking at religion from the perspective of how knowledge about what people believe in can be useful in terms of trying to resolve the most serious disputes.
I think one of the major problems is that here in the United States, particularly, there is very little understanding of Islam. We all act as if Islam is a monolithic religion and that all Muslims live in the Middle East. The bottom line is most Muslims in the world don't live in the Middle East. They live in Indonesia, or Malaysia, or India, um, Pakistan. Second, there are a number of different sects within Islam. Now I think more people understand the difference between Shia and Sunni, but that is just the beginning. We really do not know anything about it.
I think it behooves our diplomats to be very knowledgeable about religion when they are sent to a country. They obviously learn the language and the history [and] culture; they also need to learn about the religion, too.
CNN: What impact has the religious right had on politics?
Albright: Everybody ... has [an] impact on politics, that's what democracy is about. I think they have more of an impact on domestic than foreign policy.
CNN: But you mention in your book that some gave you a hard time when you were the U.S. representative to the U.N.
Albright: Well, the extremists really are very nervous in terms of the question of sovereignty and the creation of an international organization, which they misinterpret to be world government, which it actually is not. And then there are the even more extreme views -- you know, some of them saw the secretary-general as the antichrist and that I was consorting with the devil. These are the people who are afraid of the U.N., because they think it has black helicopters that will swoop down and steal your lawn furniture. And then there are some people who don't like the U.N. because it's full of foreigners, which frankly can't be helped. So you have a wide range of critics there.

The Politics of God

2007-08-20T09:24:00.000-04:00

The New York Times
August 19, 2007
By MARK LILLA

I. “The Will of God Will Prevail”
The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote, “If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?” This was not a rhetorical question. “I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth,” Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow believer that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.” There follows a kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”
This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology — yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics.
The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.
Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on everyone’s mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we will have to begin with ourselves. The history of political theology in the West is an instructive story, and it did not end with the birth of modern science, or the Enlightenment, or the American and French Revolutions, or any other definitive historical moment. Political theology was a presence in Western intellectual life well into the 20th century, by which time it had shed the mind-set of the Middle Ages and found modern reasons for seeking political inspiration in the Bible. At first, this modern political theology expressed a seemingly enlightened outlook and was welcomed by those who wished liberal democracy well. But in the aftermath of the First World War it took an apocalyptic turn, and “new men” eager to embrace the future began generating theological justifications for the most repugnant — and godless — ideologies of the age, Nazism and Communism.
It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its perspective. This would be a small step toward measuring the challenge we face and deciding how to respond.
II. The Great Separation
Why is there political theology? The question echoes throughout the history of Western thought, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and continuing down to our day. Many theories have been proposed, especially by those suspicious of the religious impulse. Yet few recognize the rationality of political theology or enter into its logic. Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be. So let us try to imagine how those reasons might involve God and have implications for politics.
Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.
In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth. That is where political theology comes in.
One powerful attraction of political theology, in any form, is its comprehensiveness. It offers a way of thinking about the conduct of human affairs and connects those thoughts to loftier ones about the existence of God, the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, the origin of all things and the end of time. For more than a millennium, the West took inspiration from the Christian image of a triune God ruling over a created cosmos and guiding men by means of revelation, inner conviction and the natural order. It was a magnificent picture that allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to flower. But the picture was always difficult to translate theologically into political form: God the Father had given commandments; a Redeemer arrived, reinterpreting them, then departed; and now the Holy Spirit remained as a ghostly divine presence. It was not at all clear what political lessons were to be drawn from all this. Were Christians supposed to withdraw from a corrupted world that was abandoned by the Redeemer? Were they called upon to rule the earthly city with both church and state, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or were they expected to build a New Jerusalem that would hasten the Messiah’s return?
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians argued over these questions. The City of Man was set against the City of God, public citizenship against private piety, the divine right of kings against the right of resistance, church authority against radical antinomianism, canon law against mystical insight, inquisitor against martyr, secular sword against ecclesiastical miter, prince against emperor, emperor against pope, pope against church councils. In the late Middle Ages, the sense of crisis was palpable, and even the Roman Church recognized that reforms were in order. But by the 16th century, thanks to Martin Luther and John Calvin, there was no unified Christendom to reform, just a variety of churches and sects, most allied with absolute secular rulers eager to assert their independence. In the Wars of Religion that followed, doctrinal differences fueled political ambitions and vice versa, in a deadly, vicious cycle that lasted a century and a half. Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews and heretics. It was madness.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.
The contemporary crisis in Western Christendom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear. Man’s natural state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, “his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity.” He “has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.” It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to “men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek.” Pitiful, but understandable.
And the debilitating dynamics of belief don’t end there. For once we imagine an all-powerful God to protect us, chances are we’ll begin to fear him too. What if he gets angry? How can we appease him? Hobbes reasoned that these new religious fears were what created a market for priests and prophets claiming to understand God’s obscure demands. It was a raucous market in Hobbes’s time, with stalls for Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men and countless others, each with his own path to salvation and blueprint for Christian society. They disagreed with one another, and because their very souls were at stake, they fought. Which led to wars; which led to more fear; which made people more religious; which. . . .
Fresh from the Wars of Religion, Hobbes’s readers knew all about fear. Their lives had become, as he put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And when he announced that a new political philosophy could release them from fear, they listened. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. He knew it was impossible to refute belief in divine revelation; the most one can hope to do is cast suspicion on prophets claiming to speak about politics in God’s name. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and try to keep them from harming one another. It would set its sights lower than Christian political theology had, but secure what mattered most, which was peace.
Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.
III. The Inner Light
It is a familiar story, and seems to conclude with a happy ending. But in truth the Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Western Europe, where it was first conceived. Old-style Christian political theology had an afterlife in the West, and only after the Second World War did it cease to be a political force. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a different challenge to the Great Separation arose from another quarter. It came from a wholly new kind of political theology heavily indebted to philosophy and styling itself both modern and liberal. I am speaking of the “liberal theology” movement that arose in Germany not long after the French Revolution, first among Protestant theologians, then among Jewish reformers. These thinkers, who abhorred theocracy, also rebelled against Hobbes’s vision, favoring instead a political future in which religion — properly chastened and intellectually reformed — would play an absolutely central role.
And the questions they posed were good ones. While granting that ignorance and fear had bred pointless wars among Christian sects and nations, they asked: Were those the only reasons that, for a millennium and a half, an entire civilization had looked to Jesus Christ as its savior? Or that suffering Jews of the Diaspora remained loyal to the Torah? Could ignorance and fear explain the beauty of Christian liturgical music or the sublimity of the Gothic cathedrals? Could they explain why all other civilizations, past and present, founded their political institutions in accordance with the divine nexus of God, man and world? Surely there was more to religious man than was dreamed of in Hobbes’s philosophy.
That certainly was the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did more than anyone to develop an alternative to Hobbes. Rousseau wrote no treatise on religion, which was probably a wise thing, since when he inserted a few pages on religious themes into his masterpiece, “Ãmile” (1762), it caused the book to be burned and Rousseau to spend the rest of his life on the run. This short section of “Ãmile,” which he called “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” has so deeply shaped contemporary views of religion that it takes some effort to understand why Rousseau was persecuted for writing it. It is the most beautiful and convincing defense of man’s religious instincts ever to flow from a modern pen — and that, apparently, was the problem. Rousseau spoke of religion in terms of human needs, not divine truths, and had his Savoyard vicar declare, “I believe all particular religions are good when one serves God usefully in them.” For that, he was hounded by pious Christians.
Rousseau had a Hobbes problem, too: he shared the Englishman’s criticisms of theocracy, fanaticism and the clergy, but he was a friend of religion. While Hobbes beat the drums of ignorance and fear, Rousseau sang the praises of conscience, of charity, of fellow feeling, of virtue, of pious wonder in the face of God’s creation. Human beings, he thought, have a natural goodness they express in their religion. That is the theme of the “Profession of Faith,” which tells the parable of a young vicar who loses his faith and then his moral compass once confronted with the hypocrisy of his co-religionists. He is able to restore his equilibrium only when he finds a new kind of faith in God by looking within, to his own “inner light” (lumière intérieure). The point of Rousseau’s story is less to display the crimes of organized churches than to show that man yearns for religion because he is fundamentally a moral creature. There is much we cannot know about God, and for centuries the pretense of having understood him caused much damage to Christendom. But, for Rousseau, we need to believe something about him if we are to orient ourselves in the world.
Among modern thinkers, Rousseau was the first to declare that there is no shame in saying that faith in God is humanly necessary. Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.” Rousseau had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.
IV. Rousseau’s Children
By the early 19th century, two schools of thought about religion and politics had grown up in the West. Let us call them the children of Hobbes and the children of Rousseau. For the children of Hobbes, a decent political life could not be realized by Christian political theology, which bred violence and stifled human development. The only way to control the passions flowing from religion to politics, and back again, was to detach political life from them completely. This had to happen within Western institutions, but first it had to happen within Western minds. A reorientation would have to take place, turning human attention away from the eternal and transcendent, toward the here and now. The old habit of looking to God for political guidance would have to be broken, and new habits developed. For Hobbes, the first step toward achieving that end was to get people thinking about — and suspicious about — the sources of faith.
Though there was great reluctance to adopt Hobbes’s most radical views on religion, in the English-speaking world the intellectual principles of the Great Separation began to take hold in the 18th century. Debate would continue over where exactly to place the line between religious and political institutions, but arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy petered out in all but the most forsaken corners of the public square. There was no longer serious controversy about the relation between the political order and the divine nexus; it ceased to be a question. No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.
The children of Rousseau followed a different line of argument. Medieval political theology was not salvageable, but neither could human beings ignore questions of eternity and transcendence when thinking about the good life. When we speculate about God, man and world in the correct way, we express our noblest moral sentiments; without such reflection we despair and eventually harm ourselves and others. That is the lesson of the Savoyard vicar.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Terror and Napoleon’s conquests, Rousseau’s children found a receptive audience in continental Europe. The recent wars had had nothing to do with political theology or religious fanaticism of the old variety; if anything, people reasoned, it was the radical atheism of the French Enlightenment that turned men into beasts and bred a new species of political fanatic. Germans were especially drawn to this view, and a wave of romanticism brought with it great nostalgia for the religious “world we have lost.” It even touched sober philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. Kant adored “Ãmile” and went somewhat further than Rousseau had, not only accepting the moral need for rational faith but arguing that Christianity, properly reformed, would represent the “true universal Church” and embody the very “idea” of religion. Hegel went further still, attributing to religion an almost vitalistic power to forge the social bond and encourage sacrifice for the public good. Religion, and religion alone, is the original source of a people’s shared spirit, which Hegel called its Volksgeist.
These ideas had an enormous impact on German religious thought in the 19th century, and through it on Protestantism and Judaism throughout the West. This was the century of “liberal theology,” a term that requires explanation. In modern Britain and the United States, it was assumed that the intellectual, and then institutional, separation of Christianity and modern politics had been mutually beneficial — that the modern state had benefited by being absolved from pronouncing on doctrinal matters, and that Christianity had benefited by being freed from state interference. No such consensus existed in Germany, where the assumption was that religion needed to be publicly encouraged, not reined in, if it was to contribute to society. It would have to be rationally reformed, of course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.
Protestant liberal theologians soon began to dream of a third way between Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation. They had unshaken faith in the moral core of Christianity, however distorted it may have been by the forces of history, and unshaken faith in the cultural and political progress that Christianity had brought to the world. Christianity had given birth to the values of individuality, moral universalism, reason and progress on which German life was now based. There could be no contradiction between religion and state, or even tension. The modern state had only to give Protestantism its due in public life, and Protestant theology would reciprocate by recognizing its political responsibilities. If both parties met their obligations, then, as the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling put it, “the destiny of Christianity will be decided in Germany.”
Among Jewish liberal thinkers, there was a different sort of hope, that of acceptance as equal citizens. After the French Revolution, a fitful process of Jewish emancipation began in Europe, and German Jews were more quickly integrated into modern cultural life than in any other European country — a fateful development. For it was precisely at this moment that German Protestants were becoming convinced that reformed Christianity represented their national Volksgeist. While the liberal Jewish thinkers were attracted to modern enlightened faith, they were also driven by the apologetic need to justify Judaism’s contribution to German society. They could not appeal to the principles of the Great Separation and simply demand to be left alone. They had to argue that Judaism and Protestantism were two forms of the same rational moral faith, and that they could share a political theology. As the Jewish philosopher and liberal reformer Hermann Cohen once put it, “In all intellectual questions of religion we think and feel ourselves in a Protestant spirit.”
V. Courting the Apocalypse
This was the house that liberal theology built, and throughout the 19th century it looked secure. It wasn’t, and for reasons worth pondering. Liberal theology had begun in hope that the moral truths of biblical faith might be intellectually reconciled with, and not just accommodated to, the realities of modern political life. Yet the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic good sense and the proper length of a gentleman’s beard. But it was too ashamed to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions — “Why be a Christian?” and “Why be a Jew?” — liberal theology offered no answer at all.
By the turn of the 20th century, the liberal house was tottering, and after the First World War it collapsed. It was not just the barbarity of trench warfare, the senseless slaughter, the sight of burned-out towns and maimed soldiers that made a theology extolling “modern civilization” contemptible. It was that so many liberal theologians had hastened the insane rush to war, confident that God’s hand was guiding history. In August 1914, Adolf von Harnack, the most respected liberal Protestant scholar of the age, helped Kaiser Wilhelm II draft an address to the nation laying out German military aims. Others signed an infamous pro-war petition defending the sacredness of German militarism. Astonishingly, even Hermann Cohen joined the chorus, writing an open letter to American Jews asking for support, on the grounds that “next to his fatherland, every Western Jew must recognize, revere and love Germany as the motherland of his modern religiosity.” Young Protestant and Jewish thinkers were outraged when they saw what their revered teachers had done, and they began to look elsewhere.
But they did not turn to Hobbes, or to Rousseau. They craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order. It was a thirst for redemption. Ever since the liberal theologians had revived the idea of biblical politics, the stage had been set for just this sort of development. When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse — one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine.
Young Weimar Jews were particularly drawn to these messianic currents through the writings of Martin Buber, who later became a proponent of interfaith understanding but as a young Zionist promoted a crude chauvinistic nationalism. In an early essay he called for a “Masada of the spirit” and proclaimed: “If I had to choose for my people between a comfortable, unproductive happiness . . . and a beautiful death in a final effort at life, I would have to choose the latter. For this final effort would create something divine, if only for a moment, but the other something all too human.” Language like this, with strong and discomforting contemporary echoes for us, drew deeply from the well of biblical messianism. Yet Buber was an amateur compared with the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who used the Bible to extol the utopia then under construction in the Soviet Union. Though an atheist Jew, Bloch saw a connection between messianic hope and revolutionary violence, which he admired from a distance. He celebrated Thomas MÃ¼ntzer, the 16th-century Protestant pastor who led bloody peasant uprisings and was eventually beheaded; he also praised the brutal Soviet leaders, famously declaring “ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem” — wherever Lenin is, there is Jerusalem.
But it was among young Weimar Protestants that the new messianic spirit proved most consequential. They were led by the greatest theologian of the day, Karl Barth, who wanted to restore the drama of religious decision to Christianity and rejected any accommodation of the Gospel to modern sensibilities. When Hitler came to power, Barth acquitted himself well, leading resistance against the Nazi takeover of the Protestant churches before he was forced into exile in 1935. But others, who employed the same messianic rhetoric Barth did, chose the Nazis instead. A notorious example was Emanuel Hirsch, a respected Lutheran theologian and translator of Kierkegaard, who welcomed the Nazi seizure of power for bringing Germany into “the circle of the white ruling peoples, to which God has entrusted the responsibility for the history of humanity.” Another was Friedrich Gogarten, one of Barth’s closest collaborators, who sided with the Nazis in the summer of 1933 (a decision he later regretted). In the 1920s, Gogarten rejoiced at the collapse of bourgeois Europe, declaring that “we are glad for the decline, since no one enjoys living among corpses,” and called for a new religion that “attacks culture as culture . . . that attacks the whole world.” When the brownshirts began marching and torching books, he got his wish. After Hitler completed his takeover, Gogarten wrote that “precisely because we are today once again under the total claim of the state, it is again possible, humanly speaking, to proclaim the Christ of the Bible and his reign over us.”
All of which served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason. In the writings of these Weimar figures, we encounter what those orthodox traditions always dreaded: the translation of religious notions of apocalypse and redemption into a justification of political messianism, now under frightening modern conditions. It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his “Leviathan.”
VI. Miracles
The revival of political theology in the modern West is a humbling story. It reminds us that this way of thinking is not the preserve of any one culture or religion, nor does it belong solely to the past. It is an age-old habit of mind that can be reacquired by anyone who begins looking to the divine nexus of God, man and world to reveal the legitimate political order. This story also reminds us how political theology can be adapted to circumstances and reassert itself, even in the face of seemingly irresistible forces like modernization, secularization and democratization. Rousseau was on to something: we seem to be theotropic creatures, yearning to connect our mundane lives, in some way, to the beyond. That urge can be suppressed, new habits learned, but the challenge of political theology will never fully disappear so long as the urge to connect survives.
So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment. In Europe, the political ambiguities of one religion, Christianity, happened to set off a political crisis that might have been avoided but wasn’t, triggering the Wars of Religion; the resulting carnage made European thinkers more receptive to Hobbes’s heretical ideas about religious psychology and the political implications he drew from them; and over time those political ideas were liberalized. Even then, it was only after the Second World War that the principles of modern liberal democracy became fully rooted in continental Europe.
As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.
And miracles can’t be willed. For all the good Hobbes did in shifting our political focus from God to man, he left the impression that the challenge of political theology would vanish once the cycle of fear was broken and human beings established authority over their own affairs. We still make this assumption when speaking of the “social causes” of fundamentalism and political messianism, as if the amelioration of material conditions or the shifting of borders would automatically trigger a Great Separation. Nothing in our history or contemporary experience confirms this belief, yet somehow we can’t let it go. We have learned Hobbes’s lesson too well, and failed to heed Rousseau’s. And so we find ourselves in an intellectual bind when we encounter genuine political theology today: either we assume that modernization and secularization will eventually extinguish it, or we treat it as an incomprehensible existential threat, using familiar terms like fascism to describe it as best we can. Neither response takes us a step closer to understanding the world we now live in.
It is a world in which millions of people, particularly in the Muslim orbit, believe that God has revealed a law governing the whole of human affairs. This belief shapes the politics of important Muslim nations, and it also shapes the attitudes of vast numbers of believers who find themselves living in Western countries — and non-Western democracies like Turkey and Indonesia — founded on the alien principles of the Great Separation. These are the most significant points of friction, internationally and domestically. And we cannot really address them if we do not first recognize the intellectual chasm between us: although it is possible to translate Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush from Farsi into English, its intellectual assumptions cannot be translated into those of the Great Separation. We can try to learn his language in order to create sensible policies, but agreement on basic principles won’t be possible. And we must learn to live with that.
Similarly, we must somehow find a way to accept the fact that, given the immigration policies Western nations have pursued over the last half-century, they now are hosts to millions of Muslims who have great difficulty fitting into societies that do not recognize any political claims based on their divine revelation. Like Orthodox Jewish law, the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands. It is an unfortunate situation, but we have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual respect can help, as can clear rules governing areas of tension, like the status of women, parents’ rights over their children, speech offensive to religious sensibilities, speech inciting violence, standards of dress in public institutions and the like. Western countries have adopted different strategies for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, others permitting them. But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low. So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected.
VII. The Opposite Shore
This is not welcome news. For more than two centuries, promoters of modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization and education would eventually “disenchant” the charmed world of believers, and that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those predictions may eventually prove right. But Europe’s rapid secularization is historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.
Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a “liberal” Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life — even an attractive one like liberal democracy — the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.
The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we’ve encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.
Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.
Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation — and we cannot — we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.
In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within their own traditions to make it happen.
Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.
Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.

PLAGUES, PEACE, & PINCHAS THE PRIEST:WHEN MEETING BRINGS A PLAGUE

2007-07-03T09:17:00.001-04:00

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
In the regular Jewish Torah reading for this week, we read the story of a Priest who becomes a murderer and calls a murderous God into reflective peacemaking.In our own day, the passage has been cited as justification for zealous murders - justification for blood shed today. In response, many peaceniks of today shrug off the story as just another bloody streak in the Biblical fabric.
But I see the story in a different light - one that celebrates turning from zealous murder to self-reflective peace.
Two peoples meet. There is risk in their meeting. Perhaps there is also a possible profit. Perhaps there is even possible delight. But among at least one of the peoples, the leadership is frightened and forbids all contact.
But there is contact anyway. Some of it is literal, physical contact: sexual relationships. But even traveling, buying, selling, may bring together across the boundaries maladies that had hardened one people but never been known by the other. As a result, as such diseases leap the boundaries, Reality Itself, the very Winds of Change, may bring on a plague of death.
For example: When the age-old barriers of Ocean were torn apart in the 16th century, two cultures came together that had never met. One result: measles decimated the Native Americans; syphilis, the Europeans.
Was this because their intimate connection was in itself a "sin"? Or was it because the rush of new connection outran the care necessary to make the connection holy?Or what if the plague is perhaps even worse -a plague of arrogance and dominance? On one side, cannons; on the other, spears.
When the Sea splits or ghetto walls fall, best make sure that as the boundaries that had been sharp and high between you become newly fuzzy, you tie sacred tzitzit -- conscious fuzzy fringes -- to mark the contact points. Take care!
But what about those who do not take sufficient care?The Torah's story of Pinchas is perhaps our sharpest test. The Israelites made friends with the people of Moab, joining with them sexually and celebrating their gods. God -- that is, Reality Itself -- sent a plague upon them. Our Name for this Reality is "YHWH." Pronounce it with no vowels and you get the sound of breath and wind, for YHWH is the Zealous Breath of Life, the Wind of Change, the Hurricane of Transformation.
The peoples met each other unprepared. The Wind of Change blew across their unprepared and unprotected boundaries, blowing into them a plague, a pestilence. Lethal measles. Lethal syphilis.
Then Pinchas, a priest and one of Aaron's sons, sees an Israelite and a Midianite having sex. In rage he flings his lance at them, transfixes and kills them both. The plague of violence ends the plague of sickness. And the Torah continues (Num. 25: 10-13):
"YHWH so-worded it though Moses, saying:
" Pinchas has turned back my hot wrath from upon the Children of Israel by expressing-zealously My zeal [b'kano et-kinati] amidst them. And so I did not finish off the Children of Israel in My zealotry [b'kinati].
" Therefore I say: Here! I give him my Covenant of Shalom; it shall be for him and his seed after him a covenant of priesthood forever, because of/ replacing [tachat] his zealotry for his God, through which he made-atonement for the Children of Israel. "

Most readers have taken this to mean that God was pleased with Pinchas. But try reading God's words this way:"In a blind rage, consumed with jealousy/zealotry, I began killing My people with the plague. Then Pinchas imitated Me: in his own blind and jealous rage, he turned his hand to killing.
"His jealous/ zealous act opened my eyes, shocked me into shame at what I Myself was doing. That is why I stopped the plague; that is why I made with Pinchas my covenant of shalom/ peace."
In this reading, God does a turn-around, a "tshuvah." God grows. The God Who begins by bringing a plague upon the people ends by making a covenant of peace. The God Who is horrified by Pinchas also sees in Pinchas' face one facet of God's Own Face.
But if we mean by "God" not an white-bearded old man in the sky but rather the Breath of Life Whose Name we hear if we try to pronounce the "YHWH" with no vowels at all; if we mean that God Who is within us, among us, beyond us -- then what does it mean for that God to do tshuvah?
What do we mean when we say "God" brought on the plague and halted it, ordered a genocide and made a covenant of peace ?
We mean that the deep processes of the universe, the Very Breath of Life Itself, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, the Name God takes on in conversation with Moses at the Burning Bush, the Name that means "I Will Be Who I Will Be," the Name that is a spiral process of Becoming -- those processes themselves act in subterranean ways to bring on genocides and plagues, and also to call forth human intervention to prevent, to soften, and to heal them.Sometimes I image this Deep Process as a double spiral or helix of I-It and I-Thou -- both of them, Divine attributes that arise in the very process of the arousal of the universe: one devotedly pursuing more and more self-reflectiveness in order to become more efficient; the other devotedly pursuing more and more self-reflectiveness in order to become more loving.
One I-It, one I-Thou. Both, aspects of One God. Perhaps more satisfying and more accurate than the classic (Kabbalistic) sense of male and female aspects of God.Alone, I-It consumes everything around us, everything we grow from, ultimately ourselves. Alone, I-Thou dissolves us into an unboundaried pool of complacent admiration. When the one leaps forward or the other hunkers down, the universe must "do tshuvah," make a crucial turn on the spiral of sacred history, in order to mirror the Infinite God more fully. .
And what does it mean for us today? A surge of I-It power within both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples has given each of them a political strength and toughness that neither had, one century ago. And that surge of volcanic energy has thrown them into conflict with each other, as they erupt in each other's faces in the one Land they both call home.
Out of this I-It collision, each people has already given birth to more than one Pinchas. Zealous murderers, zealous home-demolishers, zealous wielders of asphalt to bury farmland and divide communities. What we need is a new surge of I-Thou. a new Covenant of Peace.
For Jews, that means not only making sure that every Pinchas among us abides by God's Covenant of Peace. Not only repudiating ll efforts to justify mrder today in the name of Pinchas. Not only undertaking a public, clear, explicit, and vigorous effort to reeducate all Jews to see that God learned from Pinchas to repudiate such acts of zealotry.
It also means that we must shape our contacts with other peoples in as much mindfulness as the weaver shapes the fuzzy, intricate boundaries of tzitzit.
When Palestinians and Israelis join with each other to mourn those who have died at each other's hands, that weaves a sacred fringe between us.When our peoples join in a "Seder of the Children of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah," remembering our ancient loving family, the conflicts that erupted between us, and the peace that Ishmael and Isaac created at their father's grave -- that Seder weaves a sacred fringe between us.When Israelis and Palestinians work together to rebuild the homes destroyed by order of the Israeli government, that weaves a sacred fringe between us.
And on an even larger scene - our planet, filled with Hurricanes of Change, it is not only Israelis and Palestinians who must learn to make the careful fringes of covenant. Who must? Americans who sing "from sea to shining sea" as if those seas were impervious boundaries that give us safety. Americans who sing of the "alabaster cities undimmed by human tears" - but ignore the city that was drowned in not only water but indifference. The city drowning in its own tears. Americans who thought we only met others to convince them our ways were best - or if they said No, to civilize 'em with a bomb. Muslims who dreamed of the uncorrupted Territory of the Faithful, and were enraged by the fuzzy truths of other cultures, nations, dotted in their midst. Muslims who responded to outrageous attacks on their own self-determination with outrageous attacks on the peoples, the civilians, of those domineering governments. Those in both America and Islam who gobble oil and slobber blood as they seek a wider, longer, fuller war against the Other. Here too we must mourn together, pray together, act together to bring each other and all the life-forms on our planet into a new Covenant of Peace. When together we rebuild a house in New Orleans; when together we erect a windmill for the sake of decarbonated energy; when together we lobby to subtract subsidies from Big Oil and offered to the railroads -- These will be the common ceremonies, the common tasks, we can weave onto the corners of our peoplehoods and species so as to create a Covenant of Peace.To become true priests of the Breath of Life.